1Disraeli’s novels abound in social commentary and historical generalisations. As a result, historians have long mined them in the hope of understanding his personal political philosophy. Specific bon mots can certainly be quoted to illustrate his views on particular themes. Some prejudices recur sufficiently often in the novels to suggest that they were fixed beliefs of the author. Coningsby and Sybil were intended to publicise the ‘Young England’ movement of 1843‒45, and helped to supply slogans for it. Nonetheless, it is challenging to draw a coherent ideology from his fiction, because Disraeli prided himself on detachment and ambiguity, and on maximising his political flexibility. In recent years, it has been more common to read his novels as a personal statement of another sort: as a process of self-fashioning by a child of the Romantic movement. We are invited to see the novels as a body of work through which a self-obsessed artist crafted an identity—and, increasingly, an identity that validated his claim to be a political leader (Richmond & Smith).
2This insight is useful up to a point, though it rests on the awkward assumption that ‘Disraeli’ was more of an artificial creation than other Victorian politicians, who are rarely discussed in such terms. This is awkward because the notion of Disraeli’s artificiality rested on the allegation that he was an inveterately insincere trickster, which in turn relied a lot on anti-semitism. It is uncontentious to suggest that novel-writing often involves authorial ‘self-fashioning’. No one would dispute that Disraeli’s early novels, especially Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming, reveal his struggle to forge a public identity. The more important question is whether the theme of ‘self-fashioning’ helps us to make sense of the explicitly political novels that he published after 1846, and if not, why Disraeli wrote them.
3The purpose of this essay is to suggest that these later novels, at least from Tancred onwards, are better seen as works of political sociology than of personal philosophy. To the extent that Disraeli was still using them to present an image of himself, the image he sought was as a social analyst. He was less interested in promoting a personal creed than in explaining how politics and society interacted. His role was to supply interpretation, not solutions. I have argued elsewhere that Tancred, the novel he published in 1847, was an explicitly sociological—even anthropological—novel on a much broader canvas than its predecessors. It insisted that dialectic was the mechanism through which to understand the world. It discussed contemporary problems as a series of tensions between opposing forces, that no one currently seemed able to reconcile. Since the French Revolution, traditional harmonies had been destroyed. There was no longer common ground between Europe and Asia, Hellenism and Hebraism, Jew and Christian, past and present, leaders and people, town and nature, intrigue and idealism, action and thought. The world was broken. The object of political leadership was to resolve such tensions, but there were no longer any plausible leaders who might do so (Parry 2017).
4After Tancred, Disraeli did not write another novel until Lothair, which was published in 1870, after his first nine-month spell as Prime Minister in 1868. I want to argue that Lothair updated Tancred’s sociological analysis. It was, similarly, structured in terms of dialectic. It revisited some of the tensions that Tancred had illuminated, and reworked them to present contemporary European politics as at root a war between the religious and the republican outlook. His last published novel, Endymion (1880), should also be seen as a work of political sociology, which aimed to explain the puzzle that Lothair had left hanging in the air: why these great battles of ideas seemed to pass Britain by. Though it appeared ten years after Lothair, it was begun soon after it, in response to the great success that it had enjoyed (Buckle 1920b, 551).
5Lothair and Endymion were both major publishing events. Lothair was conceived in high secrecy, and the announcement in April 1870 that a former Prime Minister was, for the first time, to publish a novel created astonishment. The Saturday Review commented: ‘If Mr Disraeli had announced that, on Monday the 2nd of May, he would sing at the Opera, dance on a tight-rope at the Crystal Palace, or preach a sermon at Mr Spurgeon’s Tabernacle, popular surprise and curiosity would not be more strongly roused’ (Braun 1). It was reviewed in all five national morning papers on the day of publication, 6,000 copies were printed in the first nine days, 15,000 by November, and the book earned him £6,000 by 1876. Its success was international: 80,000 were sold in the United States by October 1870 (Buckle 1920a, 164‒69). He still cared about financial security, and this money was a major boon. When, after six further years as Prime Minister, the 75-year old Disraeli told the publisher Longman that he had written Endymion, he secured an unprecedented £10,000 for its publication.
6So the publication of these novels reflected Disraeli’s fame—quite irrespective of their subject-matter. His colourful history, self-promoting activities, and role in overthrowing Peel in 1846, had started the process by which he became a celebrity. He was elevated to Madame Tussaud’s as early as 1853, 17 years before Gladstone. At the Congress of Berlin, in 1878, the European media regarded him, together with Bismarck, as its great star. In 1870, his fame was boosted by his recent short spell as Prime Minister, but probably boosted more by the central role that he had played in the passage of a major Reform Act in 1867, and his boast that he had ‘educated his party’ to accept far-reaching proposals that would once have horrified them. Lothair and Endymion were not written in order to boost his profile; it was because he was already a star that he knew they would have a ready-made audience.
7But in neither 1870 nor 1880 was Disraeli seen as he often now is—as the inventor of a successful Conservative philosophy. That reputation was acquired posthumously, imposed by the needs of subsequent generations of Conservative commentators to find a prophet to legitimise their various new departures. Even in 1880, Disraeli was not widely associated with a great programme of social reform, nor yet with an imperial policy that commanded national approval. Nor was it obvious that the 1867 Act had been a brilliant and transformative political calculation. When Disraeli wrote Lothair in 1869, he was once again a political failure. Indeed most people assumed that his career was over. He was faced with the most coherent and commanding Liberal majority since the 1830s, united behind an intelligible policy and mandated with a majority in all parts of the country by a newly democratic electorate. The direction of political travel seemed obvious—towards a full-blown radical assault on the army, the Church, the land and the religious universities, assaults which had always appalled Disraeli. When he returned to his desk to finish Endymion in 1880, it was after another chastening and comprehensive electoral defeat. It is no wonder that the book assumes that Liberals would normally be in power in Britain.
8These two novels did not offer the Conservative party a strategy for electoral success. On the contrary, they were the product of a retreat from active politics, into the study and the author’s imagination. This was a world which Disraeli could control. Here, politicians behaved how he wanted, and always fell into place when confronted with his dry wit. In his mind, extra-parliamentary politics revolved around grand society entertainments in opulent town houses and on magnificent country estates. The judgments of democracy did not matter, only the machinations of individual noblemen and women. There was a large element of escapism in both books, but there was also a serious purpose. They set out his explanation of the forces contending for mastery in the modern world. They were an attempt to give his ready-made audience the insight into the west’s social and political condition that they seemed to lack.
9In Lothair, Disraeli reduced the baffling conflicts of his age to a simple clash of alternative value-systems that anyone could grasp. He presented the battles confusing Europe as a culture war—a war of philosophies between opposing ideas. His overarching model was one of antagonism between, on the one hand, the Papacy and Roman Catholicism, and, on the other, the various radical organisations that represented republicanism, secular nationalism, and scientific atheism. Two characters on opposing sides described this as a death struggle between the Catholic Church and secret societies, ‘the only two strong things in Europe’ (Disraeli 1870, II 226, 246, III 31‒32).
10The hero, Lothair, was a colourless young English noble of fantastic wealth, who was undergoing the painful process of working out his life’s purpose. The Catholic Church wished to make him a prize convert. This plot was led by Lothair’s guardian, Cardinal Grandison (modelled mainly on Archbishop Manning), and Monsignor Catesby (modelled on Thomas Capel, who was credited with the conversion of the real-life Marquess of Bute to Rome in 1868). For most of the book, they look likely to succeed. Some of the action was set in Rome, where the Vatican Council was taking place when the novel was published. The Council was an attempt to assert the spiritual authority of the Papacy over its flock. It also aimed to combat the threat presented by the forces of secular Italian nationalism to Rome and the Papal States of central Italy, the only territories on the Italian mainland not incorporated into the new Kingdom of Italy after 1866. As it happened, these places were conquered by the Italian army a few months after Lothair appeared, in September 1870, once Napoleon III was forced to withdraw the French garrison which had protected Papal rule. The novel portrayed Rome as the site of both a spiritual and a literal battle between the Roman Catholic Church and its republican opponents. It presented the radical Italian nationalist movement, the French republican secret societies, and the Irish Fenians as spiritual kin, all drawing inspiration from classical humanist values, from ancient Rome, and thus from the pull of history.
11If Rome was one of the book’s battlegrounds, Lothair himself was the other. He was fought over not just by bachelor priests but by the three beautiful young women with whom he is smitten—Clare Arundel, the saintly Catholic, Lady Corisande, the Anglican daughter of a duchess, and the mysterious Theodora, the divinely beautiful Italian cosmopolitan humanist, whose influence ultimately rescued him from the clutches of Grandison and the priests.
12Lothair repeated several of the themes that Disraeli had set out in Tancred—whose hero is another bland young English nobleman of medieval inheritance who was seeking a life mission on secure historical foundations. Disraeli aimed to show that the religious impulse, and the need to worship, remained fundamental to modern society, despite superficial appearances to the contrary. He was fascinated by the survival of mankind’s historic religious instincts, and more generally by the continuities between the present and the deep past, which he claimed explained most modern history. He had an anthropologist’s interest in the ancient roots of the behaviour of modern races and tribes.
13Lothair repeated the dominant message of Tancred—that the ‘spiritual nature of man’ had been passed down from the ancient Semites who had intuited it in ancient Arabia, apparently through God’s direct revelation. In Lothair, as in Tancred, our hero visited Jerusalem and had this explained to him, in Lothair’s case by a Syrian called Paraclete (presumably a reference to the Holy Spirit) (Disraeli 1870, III 178, 183). Disraeli suggested that the three great monotheistic religions derived from this root. The key to religion was not dogma, which was bound to evolve with sociological needs and intellectual fashions, but identity. Christians, Jews and Muslims had developed doctrinal differences over time, but should respect each other on the basis of ‘theocratic equality’ (Parry 2017, 593‒96). All worthwhile religions validated human existence by connecting communities and tribes to their forefathers. The spiritual traditions of nations rested not on doctrinal truth but on communal loyalties and familiarities. After Jerusalem, Rome was the foundation city of Christianity, and both places represented something eternal and elemental. Tancred and Lothair celebrate the spiritual and emotional power that both generated.
14A major theme of both novels was humanity’s attraction to Aryan or Hellenic ideals, as well as those Semitic ones, and the creative tension between them. The later chapters of Tancred discussed the survival and appeal of Hellenism, of pagan culture, because of man’s innate love of human beauty. Disraeli returned to this argument in Lothair. The Paraclete explained that Aryans and Semites both derived from the original revelation to man, and were each charged with developing one portion of the double nature of humanity. These portions were now represented by their two choicest families, the Hellenes and the Hebrews, who had ended their separate wanderings in order to secure human civilisation in the modern world (Disraeli 1870, III 184). In articles of 1867‒68, Matthew Arnold had famously explored the Hebrew-Hellene dichotomy, in what became Culture and Anarchy (1869). Arnold’s main concern was that—with the rise of political nonconformity in the modern Liberal party—Dissenting Calvinism and unlettered conscience now dominated national life, to the detriment of ideals of beauty and art. When Disraeli revisited the topic in Lothair, he was anxious to re-emphasise man’s Semitic inheritance, and to oppose the viewpoint popularised by Renan and Max Müller in the 1850s and 1860s, that Aryanism was central to historic Indo-European culture, whereas Semitism was a foreign and lesser import. But despite these differences of emphasis, Ragussis was right to suggest that Arnold and Disraeli shared an insistence that Hellenism and Hebraism were both fundamental elements in humanity (Ragussis 1995, 220‒33).
15Nowhere did Disraeli portray Hellenism, or Aryanism, more favourably than in Lothair. He presented it in two different forms. One was Theodora, the luminous beauty whose inspiration—spiritual, intellectual and bodily—saved Lothair from converting to Rome. She represented natural religion. She was described several times as like a Greek goddess; many men worshipped her. She mesmerised Lothair and many others. As a young actress in 1848, her public rendition of La Marseillaise inspired the Parisians to revolution; in 1850, her face appeared on the French Republic’s coin; it was her decision to go to Italy and rally Garibaldi’s troops that made the republicans’ move on Rome possible. Her womanly spirit galvanised the masculine virtue that was necessary for effective republicanism. She inspired men to imagine Rome once more as ‘the land of liberty, and law, and eloquence, and military genius’, in contrast to its current effete status, ‘garrisoned by monks and governed by a doting priest’ (Disraeli 1870, II 206). Thus she represented the best side of Hellenism.
16Meanwhile the painter Mr Phoebus represented its more selfish, self-indulgent side. Phoebus (modelled on Frederic Leighton) became rich and famous by selling his depictions of the beautiful human form; he lived an idyllic Hellenic life on an island of Aryans somewhere in the Mediterranean; he talked about Aryan purity and superiority; he disparaged book-reading and thought that education should be about the cultivation of the body. The Paraclete ridiculed Phoebus’s views and warned that a religion that worships the body beautiful led only to orgies. Phoebus, like two other middle-class radical characters, the ‘Oxford Professor’ (Goldwin Smith) and Mrs Putney Giles, was ruled by his vanity, a vanity which was all too often a consequence of disbelief in God.
17Theodora, by contrast, escaped the corrosive worship of self because her creed was founded on the worship of humanity. Her Hellenism saved Lothair from the clutches of the Roman priesthood; it also turned him from a boy into a man. It was presented as an essential element of the human condition, though ideally moderated by spirituality. Disraeli himself has recently been portrayed as a Hellenic sensualist (Kuhn). Though only one side of the story, there is surely something in this argument.
18In short, then, Lothair reminded its readers that Hebraism and Hellenism represented a necessary tension in the human spirit. It then transposed onto it the newer tension of the 1860s, of religion versus radical republicanism, which it presented as the defining international issue of the age. Both these tensions were treated with balance and detachment. Reviewers used to Disraeli’s mordant satire commented on the strikingly genial and appreciative tone with which the book handled the ideas that it discussed. The Times observed that Disraeli intruded his own ego and opinions less than in his earlier works. Lothair ultimately came down strongly against the Roman Church for its worldly deviousness, for its self-interested inventions of tradition (including the whole idea of Councils), and for its social illiberalism (particularly in relation to Clare Arundel, who becomes a nun). But most of the spokesmen for both camps, Catholic and republican, were shown to be driven mainly by high-minded and spiritual motives, and to be sincere believers in the power of ideas to save mankind. Though there was satire of individuals, hardly any were shown up as completely hypocritical and insincere. Disraeli wanted to be seen as an analyst. Indeed some reviewers understood that Lothair was intended to be a basic primer to this culture war, a digestible ‘popular’ guide to ‘recondite subjects’ (Times, 2 May 1870, 9). Count Vizthum congratulated him on setting out all the philosophical beliefs of the age in a form that a child could understand (Buckle 1920a, 164). Lothair aimed to educate a wide reading public about these conflicts.
19Disraeli did not offer solutions to them, any more than he had in Tancred. A sceptic might say that he had none to suggest. This is not quite fair, however. He would have said that no glib or doctrinaire universal solution was possible, because these were complex matters which reflected the essential dilemmas of humanity. Politicians of different countries and different generations had a duty to respond to them, but they must do so sensitively, flexibly, and realistically, bearing in mind the immediate circumstances they faced, and the materials to hand. Political solutions must always be contingent on the balance of forces in the body politic at any one time, rather than preconceived and dogmatic. Resourcefulness and creativity were essential skills of the politician, and indeed of all men of action. Though Disraeli’s Liberal opponents constantly alleged that he was unprincipled, he felt that this approach to politics was properly Conservative. The essence of Conservatism was to resolve tensions and disagreements in a way that would restore harmony and maximise stability. He often boasted of his success in settling specific small crises in this way. A prior sociological understanding of the real points at issue in such conflicts was essential, or else the attempt to settle them was bound to fail (Parry 2007, 73–76, 90, 92, 114, 128).
20Indeed Lothair can be seen as Disraeli’s proud response to the Liberal defeat of his own religious policy gambit of 1868. His brief premiership was destroyed by the failure of his strategy for solving the culture war over religion as it affected Ireland. By the winter of 1867‒68, two Fenian attacks in Britain, and the activism of Irish Catholic laymen and bishops, had made it essential for British politicians to address the vexed question of the relationship between religion and the state in Ireland. Disraeli proposed a Catholic University, and hinted at a willingness to give some state funding to Irish Catholics and Presbyterians as well as Anglicans—all with the ultimate intention of preserving the Anglican Church Establishment in Ireland. He hoped that this package would persuade the Irish Catholic MPs to support his new government. This was a reworking of a strategy that he had developed in the early 1860s to build bridges between Anglican Conservative and Irish Catholic MPs, in opposition to Palmerston’s support for Italian nationalism. But it was no more successful in 1868 than it had been before. Gladstone responded by proposing the disestablishment and disendowment of the Anglican Church in Ireland. This united the Liberal party around him; it also won the support of Irish Catholic bishops and the English Catholic leader Manning. For the first time, a major party leader declared in favour of the principle of Church disestablishment.
21Disraeli responded to Gladstone’s initiative by claiming that this showed a Liberal indifference to the public importance of religion that would have disastrous long-term effects. He proclaimed that if government foreswore its connection with the Anglican Church and the religious spirit of man, the authority of the state would suffer. In the Commons in April 1868, and again in his election address in late 1868, he warned that the new Liberal approach would ultimately benefit only the Papacy. Humans naturally sought after religious principles derived from their sense of the divine. They would seek consolation in the most powerful surviving religious institution, the Roman Church—just as the Marquess of Bute and indeed Manning had done. The plan to divorce religion from government and politics would be destructive in the short term and counter-productive in the long run (Hansard 3 April 1868, 917; Buckle 1920a, 88).
22So Lothair was an attempt to provide context for Disraeli’s failed religious strategy of the 1860s. It aimed to set the affairs of Ireland in global perspective, and to show readers that the issues at stake at the 1868 election were serious ones which deserved more reflection than the electorate had realised. This was his response to those who had said that he had been talking nonsense in 1868. At the time, the book seemed another idiosyncratic intervention by an unsuccessful political leader. A few years later, it looked to be a little more prescient. Though in 1869 Disraeli’s party appeared completely beaten, it revived in the early 1870s, very largely because of disquiet at radicals’ political plans, among them the demands of Protestant Liberal nonconformists for disestablishment and a secularist education policy in England. In 1872 and 1873, Disraeli urged electors to fight for the cause of religious defence. At Glasgow, in 1873, he appealed to the people of Scotland to join the global struggle between the spiritual and temporal power that the Kulturkampf had unleashed—but on the side of Protestantism rather than Popery or irreligious government. Again he warned that the radical secularists’ new creed, of physical and material equality and attacks on property, would not succeed in the long term; government that did not recognise ‘the spiritual nature of man’ would not endure (Disraeli 1873, 13‒17, 68‒69).
23This Conservative revival culminated in the election victory of 1874 which restored Disraeli to the premiership. But in reality it did not show that a noble battle for religious truth could ever dominate British politics, or that Disraeli’s fantasy Anglican-Catholic coalition was politically viable. The Conservative triumph was founded on several factors, including a general fear of radicalism among the propertied classes. Dislike of disestablishment among Anglican voters contributed to that, but mostly because they associated it with a greater risk of national moral decay and working-class disorder. There was no chance of an alliance of Anglican and Catholic voters over Irish policy or anything else. Once in power, Disraeli gave Irish policy little attention.
24In other words, some of the themes that Disraeli presented in Lothair explained and reiterated his political thinking in 1868. But he introduced other themes into the novel that made it very clear why his arguments then had been electorally unsuccessful. The book shows up the spiritual feebleness of Anglicanism in comparison to the fervour of Romanists and revolutionaries. Their war was essentially a continental one, though it had also infected Ireland. The British were fundamentally indifferent to these great religious struggles. In neither Tancred nor Lothair did Disraeli suggest that Anglicanism could remotely match the spiritual forcefulness or political ruthlessness of Catholic priests. Lothair himself was even more colourless and uninteresting than Tancred, and so was his Anglican female love interest, Lady Corisande—or Lady Coriander, as she was called in one skit on the book (Harte). The novel contained much passing satire of English bishops—as complacent, office-seeking guzzlers of wine and fine food. This spinelessness among Anglican leaders helped to explain why ardent young Britons were tempted to convert to Catholicism.
25A major sub-theme of Lothair was the worldliness and philistinism of England. English religion had been enfeebled by the prevailing materialism of English society. Several of its upper-class male characters, such as St Aldegonde, or the Duke of Brecon, were shown to be uncultured fools. Most of these men were swayed by ignoble passions. The pleasures of society, and business, frustrated Lothair’s aim to live a pious life (Disraeli 1870, I 185). Even British Catholics showed an Achilles’ heel: worldly ambition explained Manning’s rise, but also limited his effectiveness. Ultimately, Britain seemed incapable of embracing a spiritual reformation. Neither Anglicans nor Catholics could defeat the country’s commercialism and self-interest.
26The peculiarity of British politics—its obliviousness to great battles of ideas—was the main subject-matter of Endymion. Endymion considered the relationship between high politics and society between 1827 and 1855. It identified a sociological tension of sorts, between commercial progress and political and social tradition, but its overriding theme was their complimentarity, and the social comedy that resulted from that. As one character observed, England in these years was becoming ‘more commercial than political’ (Disraeli 1880, III 42). The main topics of political debate were taxation and commerce. Young men—like Endymion Ferrars, the book’s hero—could rise a long way if they handled them proficiently, with tact, judgment and clear talking. Money was power: City men, railway magnates and free-market ideologues could find parliamentary seats with ease, and shape the tone of national debate. Political trends reflected economic and social development. Old Toryism was swept away in 1832 because its representative men, such as Ferrars’s father (William Pitt Ferrars), lacked the flexibility and imagination to engage with that change. Instead, men like the Duke of Wellington tried to fight it. Disraeli imagined the great Tory hostess Zenobia (the Countess of Jersey) celebrating delaying the introduction of gas lighting in Grosvenor Square (Disraeli 1880, I 48). Such things could not be defeated for long, and sensible Liberal administrators like Endymion and Sidney Wilton naturally came to the fore, administering domestic affairs while ceding the management of foreign policy—real politics in Disraeli’s eyes—to the genial Anglo-Irish peer Roehampton (Palmerston).
27Endymion, like Tancred, showed how little scope politicians have to change society. Underlying economic and social circumstances did more to shape political culture. In Coningsby (1844), Disraeli had written that the spirit of the age is the thing that a great man changes, but he clearly no longer believed that (Parry 2017, 604).
28Endymion suggested that Britain’s political makeover after the 1832 Reform Act was limited; the appearance of change disguised a continuing underlying alliance of land and money. Men of commerce were absorbed with ease into political society; they were welcomed at all the salons and country house parties. Aristocrats participated enthusiastically in the mania for railway shares. One of the novel’s charms was the minor characters, such as St Barbe (modelled on William Thackeray), who spouted radical dogma until they were given places, positions or honours. Then they changed their language; he became secretary to a great magnate. Ambitious young Bertie Tremaine expected to be gifted a rotten borough seat that was abolished in the 1832 Reform Act. In an attempt to remain relevant to post-Reform Act politics, he took up fashionable Benthamism. Slowly, however, he learned how to operate in parliament, and ended up as a Tory—mirroring the real-life journey of Edward Bulwer Lytton. Another character, Job Thornberry, railed against the power of the landed interest as a youth in rural Berkshire and became a fiery orator for corn law repeal. Once it was passed, he moved back to his old village as lord of the manor, under pressure from his wife. Their son became a pious Tractarian. So the Thornberrys devoted themselves to the preservation of the old house and the local church.
29Aristocrats had great advantages in this world. Their status, possessions and wealth enabled them to offer extensive and effective hospitality. This sustained the networks that were fundamental to political success. Roehampton was a good Foreign Secretary because he understood that personal contacts, and knowledge of rivals’ character, were the essential tools of diplomacy and of all real politics (Disraeli 1880, II 61, III 43‒44).
30Likewise, women had enormous potential influence on male political careers. Endymion’s rise owed almost everything to the women who promoted his cause. His sister Myra married Roehampton with the aim of getting him a post; Lady Montfort’s salon gave him social prominence; a City magnate’s daughter secretly bankrolled him; all three also supported him emotionally. Myra and Lady Montfort both channelled their remarkable will-power to furthering his career. Lady Montfort told Endymion that everything depends on will-power; Endymion countered that surely everything depends on women; Lady Montfort retorted that it is the same thing (Disraeli 1880, II 300). The book’s plot reflected Disraeli’s awareness of how much his own career owed to his sister, his wife, his benefactress Mrs Brydges Williams, and the aristocratic women who gave him their hospitality and sympathy. The last of these, Selina, Lady Bradford, inspired the name of the book’s hero, since in Greek mythology the sleepy young shepherd Endymion is doted on by the Moon Goddess Selene (Buckle 1920b, 566).
31In Tancred, the young English hero had a princely Lebanese alter ego, Fakredeen, who possesses the intuition, ancestry and social position required to govern an eastern society. His plans are thwarted by various ill-effects of western penetration, including his own excessive admiration for England. In Endymion, likewise, the young English hero had a princely alter ego who admires England, indeed was educated there, but in this instance the outcome was more successful. Florestan’s ancestors ruled an indeterminate but important country on the shores of the Mediterranean (a mixture of France, Italy and Monaco, the last of which had a real Prince Florestan). He was dispossessed of his inheritance, and had to resort to a compact with the revolutionary secret societies to restore his rule. This compact made some people in England distrust him. But everything ended happily, because Florestan was welcomed home by his whole people, and governed liberally, pursuing an alliance with England which boosted his prosperity and England’s continental power. The character of Florestan clearly owed a lot to Napoleon III, and his triumph in the book reflected Disraeli’s consistent support for an Anglo-French entente. However Disraeli’s emphasis on Florestan’s ancestral legitimacy suggested that he may have added someone more princely to the character mix—perhaps the Duc d’Aumale, the wealthy and artistic Orleanist prince exiled to England, to whom Lothair was dedicated. Florestan’s story was suggestive, not least because Disraeli used him to show how a politically-intuitive noble leader could exploit the revolutionary secret societies for legitimist causes, rather than being exploited by them. Disraeli always insisted (however implausibly) that adroit leadership could outwit destructive popular movements.
32Endymion was Florestan’s counterpart in England: both men were driven to recover the family’s ancestral political position, by will-power and a sense of destiny. But Endymion was not a prince, just the son of a Pittite Tory who could count and was trained to project a stately administrative gravitas. Such men defined British political culture.
33Despite—or because of—its mundanity, Disraeli found British politics completely addictive, and so did Endymion: ‘the social influence, the secret information, the danger, the dexterity, the ceaseless excitement, the delights of patronage which everybody affects to disregard, the power of benefiting others’ (Disraeli 1880, II 298). The great game of politics was superior to study. It offered a chance to achieve fame by clever initiatives that united parliamentary groups around dazzling synthetic policies or ideas. To use insight and adroitness to solve political problems required skill to grasp the underlying principles at stake, whereas a reliance on superficial ideas and personal vanity usually invited failure. Political intrigue did not usually take place in public; indeed one character in Endymion insisted that the ‘first condition of real power’ is anonymity. Private life and private influence governed the world. Public men were enslaved by their responsibilities and had little room for manoeuvre (Disraeli 1880, I 329‒31). The supremacy of the private sphere explained why women were often so much more powerful than the world believed.
34So though Disraeli often drew a contrast between ideas and action, and was attracted by both, there is no doubt which he usually preferred. Though he loved tossing phrases around on paper, the sphere of political action was yet more irresistible to him. Action and intrigue left no time for Disraeli’s besetting problem, self-obsession and melancholy. As Captain Bruges, the republican army commander, commented in Lothair: ‘Action may not always be happiness, but there is no happiness without action’ (Disraeli 1870, III 206, 163‒64). For all his depression about politics in 1869‒70, Disraeli had no intention of giving up the political game. And his response to his final loss of power in 1880 was to craft Endymion, the most affectionate novel ever written about nineteenth-century British political life.
35Disraeli naturally thought in dialectical terms. He instinctively analysed situations in terms of tensions between opposing forces. In Tancred, his focus was on west and east, and on Hellenism and Hebraism. In Lothair, it was on Hellenism and Hebraism, religion and republicanism, and Europe and England. In neither novel did Disraeli hold out much chance of reconciling these tensions; his aim in writing them was to show his audience the importance of his analytical framework. In Endymion, on the other hand, the opposites are much less visible. British public life had fused potentially opposing forces—country and town, land and money, past and present, ideas and action—with remarkable success. Politics worked and would probably continue to work—assuming that radicalism continued to be constrained by social traditions. Because the opposing forces clashed much less, politicians could generally resolve whatever difficulties arose dextrously. Endymion was much more interested in the political effect of economic and social developments—such as the railway boom—than of policy initiatives such as the corn laws (though in view of Disraeli’s own history this was perhaps not surprising). To the philosophical theorist, British politics did not seem very heroic. From Disraeli’s perspective, however, it was an object of fascination, and Endymion, his last major intervention in public life, was his idiosyncratic celebration of it.