Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey (sites to read books for free TXT) 📕

low with Oriental gravity and Oriental submissiveness, he set himself to his task. He had understood from the first that in dealing with the Faery the appropriate method of approach was the very antithesis of the Gladstonian; and such a method was naturally his. It was not his habit to harangue and exhort and expatiate in official conscientiousness; he liked to scatter flowers along the path of business, to compress a weighty argument into a happy phrase, to insinuate what was in his mind with an air of friendship and confidential courtesy. He was nothing if not personal; and he had perceived that personality was the key that opened the Faery’s heart. Accordingly, he never for a moment allowed his intercourse with her to lose the personal tone; he invested all the transactions of State with the charms of familiar conversation; she was always the royal lady, the adored and revered mistress, he the devoted and respectful friend. When once the personal relation was firmly established, every difficulty disappeared. But to maintain that relation uninterruptedly in a smooth and even course a particular care was necessary: the bearings had to be most assiduously oiled. Nor was Disraeli in any doubt as to the nature of the lubricant. “You have heard me called a flatterer,” he said to Matthew Arnold, “and it is true. Everyone likes flattery, and when you come to royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”342 He practiced what he preached. His adulation was incessant, and he applied it in the very thickest slabs. “There is no honor and no reward,” he declared, “that with him can ever equal the possession of your Majesty’s kind thoughts. All his own thoughts and feelings and duties and affections are now concentrated in your Majesty, and he desires nothing more for his remaining years than to serve your Majesty, or, if that service ceases, to live still on its memory as a period of his existence most interesting and fascinating.”343 “In life,” he told her, “one must have for one’s thoughts a sacred depository, and Lord Beaconsfield ever presumes to seek that in his Sovereign Mistress.”344 She was not only his own solitary support; she was the one prop of the State. “If your Majesty is ill,” he wrote during a grave political crisis, “he is sure he will himself break down. All, really, depends upon your Majesty.” “He lives only for Her,” he asseverated, “and works only for Her, and without Her all is lost.”345 When her birthday came he produced an elaborate confection of hyperbolic compliment. “Today Lord Beaconsfield ought fitly, perhaps, to congratulate a powerful Sovereign on her imperial sway, the vastness of her Empire, and the success and strength of her fleets and armies. But he cannot, his mind is in another mood. He can only think of the strangeness of his destiny that it has come to pass that he should be the servant of one so great, and whose infinite kindness, the brightness of whose intelligence and the firmness of whose will, have enabled him to undertake labours to which he otherwise would be quite unequal, and supported him in all things by a condescending sympathy, which in the hour of difficulty alike charms and inspires. Upon the Sovereign of many lands and many hearts may an omnipotent Providence shed every blessing that the wise can desire and the virtuous deserve!”346 In those expert hands the trowel seemed to assume the qualities of some lofty masonic symbol⁠—to be the ornate and glittering vehicle of verities unrealised by the profane.

Such tributes were delightful, but they remained in the nebulous region of words, and Disraeli had determined to give his blandishments a more significant solidity. He deliberately encouraged those high views of her own position which had always been native to Victoria’s mind and had been reinforced by the principles of Albert and the doctrines of Stockmar. He professed to a belief in a theory of the Constitution which gave the Sovereign a leading place in the councils of government; but his pronouncements upon the subject were indistinct; and when he emphatically declared that there ought to be “a real Throne,” it was probably with the mental addition that that throne would be a very unreal one indeed whose occupant was unamenable to his cajoleries. But the vagueness of his language was in itself an added stimulant to Victoria. Skilfully confusing the woman and the Queen, he threw, with a grandiose gesture, the government of England at her feet, as if in doing so he were performing an act of personal homage. In his first audience after returning to power, he assured her that “whatever she wished should be done.”347 When the intricate Public Worship Regulation Bill was being discussed by the Cabinet, he told the Faery that his “only object” was “to further your Majesty’s wishes in this matter.”348 When he brought off his great coup over the Suez Canal, he used expressions which implied that the only gainer by the transaction was Victoria. “It is just settled,” he wrote in triumph; “you have it, Madam⁠ ⁠… Four millions sterling! and almost immediately. There was only one firm that could do it⁠—Rothschilds. They behaved admirably; advanced the money at a low rate, and the entire interest of the Khedive is now yours, Madam.”349 Nor did he limit himself to highly-spiced insinuations. Writing with all the authority of his office, he advised the Queen that she had the constitutional right to dismiss a Ministry which was supported by a large majority in the House of Commons, he even urged her to do so, if, in her opinion, “your Majesty’s Government have from wilfulness, or even from weakness, deceived your Majesty.”350 To the horror of Mr. Gladstone, he not only kept the Queen informed as to the general course of business