enthusiasms of the nations of Europe. The
same passionate intensity which makes the grandeur of the ancient
Hebrew literature still lives among them, though often narrowed by
ages of oppression, and gives them the peculiar effectiveness that
comes from turning all the powers of the mind, imaginative as well as
reasoning, into a single channel, be that channel what it may. They
produce, in proportion to their numbers, an unusually large number of
able and successful men, as any one may prove by recounting the
eminent Jews of the last seventy years. This success has most often
been won in practical life, in commerce, or at the bar, or in the
press (which over the European continent they so largely control); yet
often also in the higher walks of literature or science, less
frequently in art, most frequently in music.

Mr. Disraeli had three of these characteristics of his race in
full measure--detachment, intensity, the passion for material success.
Nature gave him a resolute will, a keen and precociously active
intellect, a vehement individuality; that is to say, a consciousness
of his own powers, and a determination to make them recognised by
his fellows. In some men, the passion to succeed is clogged by the
fear of failure; in others, the sense of their greatness is
self-sufficing and indisposes them to effort. But with him ambition
spurred self-confidence, and self-confidence justified ambition. He
grew up in a cultivated home, familiar not only with books but with
the brightest and most polished men and women of the day, whose
conversation sharpened his wits almost from childhood. No religious
influences worked upon him, for his father had ceased to be a Jew in
faith without becoming even nominally a Christian, and there is little
in his writings to show that he had ever felt anything more than
an imaginative, or what may be called an historical, interest in
religion.[4] Thus his development was purely intellectual. The society
he moved in was a society of men and women of the world--witty,
superficial in its interests, without seriousness or reverence. He
felt himself no Englishman, and watched English life and politics as a
student of natural history might watch the habits of bees or ants.
English society was then, and perhaps is still, more complex, more
full of inconsistencies, of contrasts between theory and practice,
between appearances and realities, than that of any other country.
Nowhere so much limitation