a glance; few men can deceive me. My mind is a continental mind. It is a revolutionary mind. I am only truly great in action. If ever I am placed in a truly eminent position I shall prove this. I could rule the House of Commons, although there would be a great prejudice against me at first. . . The fixed character of our English society, the consequence of our aristocratic institutions, renders a career difficult.
Poetry is the safety-valve of my passions but I wish to act what I write. My works are the embodiment of my feelings. In Vivian Grey I have portrayed my active and real ambition. The Psychological Romance ("Contarini Fleming") is a development of my poetic character.
Every stroke of this veracious prophecy, this astonishing piece of self-delineation, lays bare with precision the excited nervous system of his genius; but let us pause to develop a little one remarkable sentence: "I have a revolutionary mind." At the time this passage was written, Disraeli was brooding upon his poem on Napoleon, which, as he conceived it, was to celebrate the spirit of his own time as the "Divine Comedy" had celebrated the Catholic Middle Ages, and as Milton's work had celebrated the consequences of the Reformation. "Since the revolt of America," he writes in December, 1833, "a new principle has been at work in the world, to which I trace all that occurs. This is the Revolutionary principle, and this is what I wish to embody
