eighing reasons and reaching a decision which recognises all
the facts and is not confused by their seeming contradictions. Neither
was it analytically subtle. It reached its conclusions by a process of
intuition or divination in which there was an imaginative as well as a
reflective element. It might almost have been called an artist's mind,
capable of deep meditation, but meditating in an imaginative way, not
so much on facts as on its own views of facts, on the pictures which
its own creative faculty had called up. The meditation became dreamy,
but the dreaminess was corrected by an exceedingly keen and quick
power of observation, not the scientific observation of the
philosopher, but rather the enjoying observation of the artist who
sees how he can use the characteristic details which he notes, or the
observation of the forensic advocate (an artist, too, in his way) who
perceives how they can be fitted into the presentation of his case.
There are, of course, other qualities in Disraeli's work. As a
statesman he was obliged to learn how to state facts, to argue, to
dissect an opponent's arguments. But the characteristic note, both of
his speeches and of his writings, is the combination of a few large
ideas, clear, perhaps, to himself, but generally expressed with
grandiose vagueness, and often quite out of relation to the facts as
other people saw them, with a turn for acutely fastening upon small
incidents or personal traits. In his speeches he used his command of
sonorous phrases and lively illustrations, sometimes to support the
views he was advancing, but more frequently to conceal the weakness of
those views; that is, to make up for the absence of such solid
arguments as were likely to move his hearers. Everybody is now and
then conscious of holding with assured conviction theories which he
would find it hard to prove to a given audience, partly because it is
too much trouble to trace out the process by which they were reached,
partly because uninstructed listeners could not be made to feel the
full cogency of the considerations on which his own mind relies.
Disraeli was usually in this condition with regard to his political
and social doctrines. He believed them, but as he had not reached them
by logic, he was not prepared to use logic to establish them; so he
picked up some plausible illustration, or attacked the opposite
doctrine and its supporters with a fire of raillery or invective. This
non-ratiocinative q