DISRAELI
I
For two reasons or (shall we say) against two main obstacles, both serious, Benjamin Disraeli found it hard to gain the ear of Parliament and, having gained it, had yet a long fight before attaining office. To begin with, his race and reputation were against him. He was a Jew, and he had written novels. He was admittedly clever to excess: but cleverness, specially when tainted by literary skill, is, of all others, the reputation which our British Senate most profoundly (and perhaps on the whole wisely) distrusts. That the House “hates a man who makes it think” was the observation of a cynic, no doubt. But I have also heard it said by one long a member of it, that a speaker there must always count on somebody—he knows not whom—who knows the subject more thoroughly than he. Its instinct being for solidity, it shrinks from brilliance as a danger: and this was specially true of the party to which Disraeli allied himself—upon which, we may say, he thrust himself—a Jew, an adventurer, an ambitious, esurient fellow without any stake in the country. What had a party, which didn’t in the least object to being called stupid, to gain by the support of such an outsider?
And it is obvious that, for Parliamentary success, Disraeli had to overcome something more serious—a certain bumptiousness of manner, a youthful confidence and ease in Sion, helped out by elaborate ringlets, mannerisms and a foppish dress very much overdone: an opulence of speech and waistcoat, both jarring on the very men—and probably most upon these—into whose less-oiled heads he was fighting to drive some ideas. There is a great deal of tactlessness in the story of Disraeli, right up to the moment of Peel’s fall. But the story witnesses not only to a growing mastery, won by amazing courage, over the House but—better—to a discipline won over himself.
II
Now as Disraeli, being a novelist, was naturally suspect among the party with whom he had chosen to cast his political lot, so his books were naturally suspected and unjustly treated by his opponents throughout his lifetime: and for this again we may decide that he was largely to blame. He was, as you know, the son of a man of letters: as he puts it, “born in a library, and trained from early childhood by learned men who did not share the passions and prejudices of our political and social life.” In his early work, such as The Young Duke or The Infernal Marriage, we find, with all its excess—the excess of youth—a hard literary finish. Let me quote from the last-named story a few sentences for specimen:
The next morning the Elysian world called to pay their respects to Proserpine. Her Majesty, indeed, held a drawing-room, which was fully and brilliantly attended.... From this moment the career of Proserpine was a series of magnificent entertainments. The principal Elysians vied with each other in the splendour and variety of the amusements which they offered to the notice of their Queen. Operas, plays, balls and banquets followed in dazzling succession. Proserpine who was almost inexperienced in society, was quite fascinated. She regretted the years she had wasted in her Sicilian solitude: and marvelled that she could ever have looked forward with delight to a dull annual visit to Olympus; she almost regretted that, for the sake of an establishment, she could have been induced to cast her lot in the regal gloom of Tartarus. Elysium exactly suited her.
Now that, in its way, is as neat as can be. You perceive at once that the style is literary and controlled. Nor, even in the tumultuous close of Vivian Grey, his first work, can you fail to perceive that, though exuberant, it was at first controlled. He says:
I have too much presumed upon an attention which I am not able to command. I am, as yet, but standing without the gate of the garden of romance. True it is that, as I gaze through the ivory bars of its golden portal I would fain believe that, following my roving fancy, I might arrive at some green retreats hitherto unexplored, and loiter among some leafy bowers where none have lingered before me. But these expectations may be as vain as those dreams of youth over which we have all mourned. The disappointment of manhood succeeds to the delusions of youth: let us hope that the heritage of old age is not despair.
Analyse that, and you will find it youthful, orientally luxuriant, but well bridled, on the whole, to the cadence of good prose. Press your analysis a little further, and you will detect the voice of a born rhetorician even in its first sentence. Let me add but two words to it:
I have too much presumed, Mr. Speaker, upon an attention which I am not able to command.
—and you have the House of Commons before you, with Peel and Macaulay, Palmerston and Lord John Russell, listening. Even so early his vocation can be detected as calling, enticing Disraeli away from the stern discipline of letters to the easier success of rhetoric, from the sessions of silent thought to the immediate response of an auditory, whether in Parliament or at the foot of the hustings. As even the noblest, most impassioned sentences of Cicero, addressed to Senate or law-court, wear a somewhat artificial, attitudinising air to us in comparison (say) with a colloquy of Socrates meditated and colloquially reported by Plato, so, speaking as one who has recently had to search for true prose, as we conceive it, among the speeches of British orators, I promise but a thin harvest to the researcher: the simple reason being that oratory plays to the moment, literature to thoughts and emotions carried away, reconsidered, tested, approved on second thought and in solitude. Not forgetting many purple patches in Chatham, his son, Fox, Sheridan, Canning, Bright, Lincoln, Gladstone and Disraeli himself, I yet assure you that nowhere—save with the incomparable Burke—you will find great gleaning on that many-acred field. And Burke, our glorious exception, was “the dinner-bell of the House” when he rose to speak. I fancy that the most of our legislators when lately seeking re-election would have avoided a Burke—and wisely.
I shall have more to say of this before I conclude. For the moment I am but concerned to point out to you that Parliamentary practice laid a double trap for Disraeli as a writer: the first inherent in that practice, the second a peculiar temptation for him.
“It is only by frequent and varied iteration,” says Herbert Spencer somewhere, “that unfamiliar truths can be impressed upon reluctant minds”: and who has ever served, for example, on a County Council and not felt the iron of that truth penetrate his soul? How true must it have been of a young man, brilliant but suspected, kept out of office on suspicion, preaching a new creed not so much to the benches opposite or into the necks of a distrustful ministry, but hammering it, rather, upon the intelligence of supporters scarcely less distrustful while infinitely more stupid! Can any conceivable task tempt more to that redundancy which destroys a clean literary style?
Now for the man himself.—He was an Oriental and proud of it (let Tancred, in particular, attest), of a race but lately admitted to the House of Commons and, if for that reason only, challenged to display himself in debate. With a courage perhaps unexampled in Parliamentary story he let himself go, took the risk, triumphed. But the dyer’s hand must inevitably acknowledge, sooner or later, its trade. Now of all practitioners in English writing, a man of Oriental mind and upbringing has to beware of this—that no Occidental literature, since Greece taught it, will suffer ornament as an addition superinduced upon style: and, after some experience, I put it quite plainly—if harshly, yet seriously for his good—to any Indian student who may be listening to these words—that extraneous ornament in English is not only vapid, but ridiculous as the outpouring of a young Persian lover who, unable equally by stress of passion and defect of education to unburden his heart, betakes himself to a professional letter-writer; who in his turn (in Newman’s words)—
dips the pen of desire into the ink of devotion and proceeds to spread it over the page of desolation. Then the nightingale of affection is heard to warble to the rose of loveliness while the breeze of anxiety plays around the brow of expectation.
“That,” says Newman, “is what the Easterns are said to consider fine writing”: and Disraeli, yielding to that Oriental temptation, will give you, again and again, whole passages that might have been hired, to depict the stateliest homes of England, from any professional penman in any Eastern bazaar.
Speaking, in the Preface to Lothair, of his early work, Disraeli himself admits that much of it (and Vivian Grey in particular) suffers at least from affectation. “Books written by boys, which pretend to give a picture of manners and to deal in knowledge of human nature, must,” he says, “be affected. They can be, at the best, but the results of imagination acting on knowledge not acquired by experience. Of such circumstances exaggeration is a necessary consequence, and false taste accompanies exaggeration.” Yes, but Lothair appeared in 1870, when its author had been Prime Minister, and had certainly acquired by experience much knowledge of the world and human nature: and the trouble is that in this very book the youthful exaggeration not only persists but has exaggerated itself ten-fold, that the Eastern flamboyancy is more flamboyant than ever. Take, for example, the following description of the ducal breakfast-table at Brentham—
The breakfast-room at Brentham was very bright. It opened on a garden of its own, which at this season was so glowing, and cultured into patterns so fanciful and finished, that it had the resemblance of a vast mosaic. The walls of the chamber were covered with bright drawings and sketches of our modern masters and frames of interesting miniatures, and the meal was served at half-a-dozen or more round tables which vied with each other in grace and merriment....
—as well, one may pause to observe, as in rotundity. These half-a-dozen or more round tables were
brilliant as a cluster of Greek or Italian republics.... After breakfast the ladies retired to their morning room.
We have already been told what they did there—
One knitted a purse, another adorned a slipper, a third emblazoned a page. Beautiful forms in counsel leant over frames glowing with embroidery, while two fair sisters more remote occasionally burst into melody, as they tried the passages of a new air which had been communicated to them in the manuscript of some devoted friend.
On the other hand
the gentlemen strolled to the stables, Lord St. Aldegonde lighting a Manilla cheroot of enormous length. As Lothair was very fond of horses, this delighted him.
—the cheroot, apparently.
The stables at Brentham were rather too far from the house, but they were magnificent, and the stud worthy of them. It was numerous and choice, and, above all, it was useful. It could supply a readier number of capital riding horses than any stable in England. [Advt.] Brentham was a great riding family. In the summer season the Duke delighted to head a numerous troop, penetrate far into the country, and scamper home to a nine o’clock dinner. All the ladies of the house were fond and fine horsewomen. The mount of one of these riding parties was magical. The dames and damsels vaulted on their barbs and genets and thorough-bred hacks with such airy majesty: they were absolutely overwhelming with their bewildering habits and bewitching hats.
Now, whatever else we say of that, it belongs—does it not?—to the Arabian Nights rather than to English acres and the line of English fiction. It is Bluebeard bewitching his guests—his next bride among them—with a delicious fête-champêtre. Nay, can you not imagine our poor English Duke gripping the back of his ducal head in the endeavour to recognise himself as leader of this cavalcade? It almost defies parody. Even Thackeray could but make fun of it, in Codlingsby, by opposition of scene rather than by caricature of style; by transferring the style merely and maliciously to an old clothes shop in Holywell Street, as thus—
They entered a moderate-sized apartment—indeed Holywell Street is not above a hundred yards long, and this chamber was not more than half that length—and fitted up with the simple taste of its owner.
The carpet was of white velvet—(laid over several webs of Aubassun, Ispahan, and Axminster, so that your foot gave no more sound as it trod upon the yielding plain than the shadow did which followed you)—of white velvet painted with flowers, arabesques and classic figures by Sir William Ross, J. M. W. Turner, Mrs. Mee and Paul Delaroche, etc.
“Welcome to our snuggery, my Codlingsby. We are quieter here than in the front of the house, and I wanted to show you a picture.... That Murillo was pawned to my uncle by Marie Antoinette.”
III
Disraeli’s style, in short, cried aloud for attack by critics who hated him on other scores.
“Personal influences,” wrote he, “inevitably mingle in some degree with such productions. There are critics who, abstractedly, do not approve of successful books, particularly if they have failed in the same style; social acquaintances also of lettered taste, and especially contemporaries whose public life has not exactly realised the vain dreams of their fussy existence, would seize the accustomed opportunity of welcoming with affected discrimination about nothing, and elaborate controversy about trifles, the production of a friend: and there is always, both in politics and literature, the race of the Dennises, the Oldmixons, and Curls, who flatter themselves that by libelling some eminent personage of their times, they have a chance of descending to posterity.”
This sounds well enough, indeed. But in point of fact Disraeli has a persistent habit of wrapping up his incomparable gift of irony in language so detestably fustian that even a fair critic has to search his periods carefully, separating the true from the sham. A fine ear will separate them: but it needs a fine ear, and will tax it the most of its time. All his life, in letters as in politics, he posed somewhat as a Man of Mystery: and your Man of Mystery must take the rough with the smooth: and your Cagliostro or even your honest merchant who talks at once too floridly and too cleverly cannot blame any plain auditor for suspecting that he talks, all the while, with his tongue in his cheek.
It is a pity: for I do not see how any fair-minded reader of Disraeli’s novels can fail to acknowledge, at this distance of time, that the man was eminently serious, and in earnest, and wise even. I spoke to you, a fortnight ago—at too great a length, you may think—of the problem of industrial England and how the misery of the poor, caught in its machinery, forced itself through the imaginative sympathy of certain writers upon the national conscience: and especially (you may remember) I spoke of the children because the children won the battle. As Francis Thompson says, “The grim old superstition was right. When man would build to a lasting finish, he must found his building over a child.”
Well, I see no reason to doubt—no reason either in his writings or his public action—that Disraeli’s concern over this industrial misery was ever less than disinterested, sincere, even chivalrous. No one can deny the sincerity, at least, of Sybil; no one the terrible authenticity of its descriptive pages—such as the famous picture of a gang emerging from a coal-mine: for research has shown that throughout and almost sentence by sentence the author has been at silent pains to document the almost incredible evidence of his own eyes with evidence from Blue Books and Parliamentary Reports. I shall not harrow your feelings by reading the passage, having harrowed them (as I say) sufficiently a fortnight ago. But you may take it for the moment—as you may amply satisfy yourselves by enquiry later and at leisure—that the Inferno is faithfully depicted: that the mill-owners Shuffle and Screw (Disraeli had a foible for such names and for running them in double harness—you will recall those celebrated duettists, Taper and Tadpole)—that the exactions of these men were real exactions, that the sufferings of the handweaver Warner and his starving family are sufferings that did actually break actual human hearts and that even the upbringing of the factory urchin Devilsdust is not only true to fact but typical. You may be excused for doubting as you read how Devilsdust—so he came to be called, for he had no legitimate name—“having survived a baby-farm by toughness of constitution, and the weekly threepence ceasing on his mother’s death,” was thrown out into the streets to starve or be run over: how even this expedient failed—
The youngest and feeblest of the band of victims, Juggernaut spared him to Moloch. All his companions were disposed of. Three months’ play in the streets got rid of this tender company....
You shudder as you read how the cholera visited the cellar where he and other outcasts slept, until
—one night when he returned home he found the old woman herself dead and surrounded only by corpses. The child before this had slept on the same bed of straw with a corpse: but then there were also breathing things for his companions. A night passed only with corpses seemed to him itself a kind of death. He stole out of the cellar, quitted the quarter of pestilence, and, after much wandering, lay down at the door of a factory.
—where he was taken in, not from charity, but because a brat of five was useful. Do you tell yourself that Disraeli exaggerates? Then turn to Hansard and read that before Hanway’s Act the annual death-rate among these pauper children was estimated at something between 60 and 70 per cent.: that this Act, as Howlett grimly put it, caused “a deficiency of 2,100 burials a year”: that the London parishes by custom claimed a right to dispose at will of all children of a person receiving relief, and disposed of them to the manufacturers; and that one Lancashire mill-owner agreed with a London parish to take one idiot with every twenty sound children supplied.3
3 The Town Labourer, 1760–1832, by Mr. and Mrs. Hammond, p. 145. From Horner’s Speech, Hansard, June 6, 1815.
IV
Man, as Aristotle tells us, is a political animal: and among imaginative writers in the ’thirties and ’forties of the last century, Disraeli had an eminently political mind. I say, “eminently,” because in the years that followed the great struggle over the Reform Bill all men’s eyes—eyes of advocates as of opponents—were turned on this wonderful Reformed Parliament, awaiting some transformation of our society, for good or for evil. The expectancy operated on Disraeli as on the rest. He was a House of Commons man with his ambition centred on success in that House. He did not believe that this reformed House was in any way capable of producing a millennium. With his own purpose very steadily set to advance his career; with a sense of intrigue and a courage steadily sharpened by disappointment; he perceived the nostrums of the new Parliament to be nostrums no more honest than the old; as he perceived the counteracting devices of his own party to be no more than delaying devices devoid of principle. He hated the very name of “the Conservative Party” invented by Croker:
I observe, indeed, a party in the State whose rule is to consent to no change until it is clamorously called for, and then instantly to yield; but these are Concessionary, not Conservative principles. This party treats institutions as we do our pheasants, they preserve but to destroy.
But he felt, with the feeling of England, that this evil of the factory system demanded an instant redress only to be achieved by sharp legislation: and, so far he was right. Ashley and his backers could look nowhere but to Parliament for immediate cure. There happen from time to time in the history of a nation (as sensible men must admit) crises to which hasty methods must be applied, as you catch up and spoil a valuable rug to smother an outbreak of fire.
V
We know how Disraeli, in those days, saw the full problem. Here was a country, this England, divided into Two Nations, the rich and the poor. Here were the nobles who should, by all devoir, be the saviours of the State, standing by while the middle-class manufacturer held the poor in misery; standing by while the authority of the Crown diminished under steady depression by the Whigs; standing by while Churchmen fought for preferment, neglecting the oppressed, for whom—by every teaching of Christ—a true disciple is a trustee. You all know, I doubt not, the main persons and principles of the Young England party which rallied to Disraeli’s call. The men were all younger than he; mostly of Eton and Cambridge—foremost George Smythe, later Viscount Strangford, most brilliant of all, Lord John Manners, Alexander Baillie Cochrane “the fiery and generous Buckhurst” of Coningsby. All of them figure, under other names, in Coningsby, and, while that novel is remembered, will be identified in its pages; that is, long after human memory has ceased to care for the personal romance of young men once so chivalrous and admired—
But the tenets of this Young England party which gathered so eagerly about the maturer man, Disraeli, were these, as you know: the King stood over all, with his prerogative to be vindicated. His rightful vindicators were our ancient nobility, and their task was to exalt, to sustain him as protector of the poor, and so to restore the peasantry of England (including its mill-hands, famished families, pauper children) to the supposedly happy conditions once enjoyed in the golden age of the monasteries, but forfeit under the oppression of middle-class “industrialists,” as we should now term them. I find, for my part, no real evidence of this golden age of the monasteries, and suspect the glow they reputedly shed over a consented medieval countryside to be very vastly enlarged by the mist of romance. But whatever they might or might not have been, their lethargy could never have matched, for evil, the active cruelty of the new system. The monasteries were dead, anyhow: the mills and the mines were grinding lives into death by tens of thousands under men’s eyes. Disraeli knew how the bringing up of a Devilsdust turns the grown man into a Chartist, and a danger. Disraeli understood Chartists.
VI
In September, 1841, Peel (who owed it to him) refused Disraeli office. We need not go into that tortuous story, or the rights of it this way or that. The point for us is that his exclusion gave him leisure to write Coningsby.
What were his qualifications, what his disqualifications in writing Coningsby?
To begin with the disqualifications—(1) He had the haziest notion of constructing a plot. From first to last he never gets beyond an idea, and a string of episodes. (2) His hero is, for all his recommendation, an invariable nincompoop, and his heroine (Sybil particularly) not of flesh and blood: not even an embodiment of an idea; a dream of it rather. Coningsby does very much less than justice to Smythe, a man of failings and infinite wit; while in Lothair you will pass whole pages in which the hero’s contribution to the wisdom of the world amounts to “You don’t say so,” “I am more than a little surprised,” “I have never looked into this matter upon which Your Grace sheds for me, I confess, an entirely new light.” You may say that the heroes and heroines of most Victorian novels are puppets conducted through adversity to a chime of marriage bells. But Disraeli deliberately presenting his heroes and heroines as grandiose creatures of ineffable charm, has never the art to make them justify this by what they do or say. Their golden, or raven, hair hangs down their back, and there it ends. Lastly his prose lapses, as the rhetorician’s hand becomes subdued to what it works in, into sentences more and more slipshod: while fatuities abound, such as the exclamation, at the beginning of a chapter, “What wonderful things are events!”
So far the devil’s advocate.... But set against this, first and in front of it, the great fact that an inventor is great not only because he does a thing well, but because he could do it at all. Disraeli in Coningsby invented the political novel: and I know nothing to compare with that book unless it be his own Endymion in which so touchingly an old man, dejected from political office and power, seeks back with all his worldly wisdom, as one walking out into a garden in a lunar light of memory, to recapture the rose of youth. Of the trilogy—Coningsby, Sybil, Tancred—I confess, tracing it backward, that I have small use for Tancred, having (be it confessed) not only a stark insensibility to Disraeli’s enthusiasm for a mongrel religion neither of his breed nor of mine, but a constitutional aversion to the Lion of Judah considered as a pet. Sybil, in addition to its most vivid pictures of the factory poor, has at least a score of pages which no student of the art of writing in English can afford to neglect—take for example its tour de force in exhibiting the rise of the Marney family and the successive ennoblements of John Warren, club waiter, and his progeny, through Sir John Warren, and Lord Fitz-Warene, to Earl de Mowbray of Mowbray Castle. The juxtaposition of the selfish and opulent Marney household with the wretched mines, close by, from which they drew their wealth, is admirably managed. But, as I have said, the heroine is but a shadowy figure, and I find the hero little more lively: the pair of them “made for a purpose,” and that purpose propaganda. No: Coningsby is the masterpiece: and Peel’s refusal which led to its composition—Peel’s own fatal loss, as it turned out—is our delightful gain. You will easily find, in almost any period of our prose literature since Defoe, a more noble novel: and if one goes back to early romance and thinks (say) of a page of Malory—well, it rebukes the sensual rapture. But, for all that, I defy you to find a more vivacious, a more scintillating book—scintillating with joyful and irresistible malice. At the turn of any page you may happen on such a gem as this:
Lord and Lady Gaverstock were also there, who never said an unkind thing of anybody: her ladyship was pure as snow: but, her mother having been divorced, she ever fancied she was paying a kind of homage to her parent by visiting those who might some day be in the same predicament.
It dares history, and will, for a whole chapter, recount the fall of a Government, the passing of a Bill, the formation of a Cabinet, unravelling actual intrigue, carrying you along by sheer logic as though you galloped with Dumas’ Three Musketeers. Disraeli could not invent a character: but he could at once disguise and reveal one borrowed from life. In Coningsby he had actual men made to his hands, to prompt the apotheosis or the caricature. He sentimentalises his young friends, and the sense beneath the sensibility may be read in the last paragraph of Sybil. What he could do with an enemy let the portrait of Rigby attest.
VII
In Coningsby he invented the Political Novel. That this partus masculus came so late to birth in our literature, as that it has begotten few successors, admits (as Sir Thomas Browne would say) no wide solution. Genius is rare, anyhow: the combination of political with literary genius necessarily rarer. Given the two combined, as they were in Burke, you still require, for superadding, the inventive faculty, the mode, and the leisure. Not one man of letters in ten thousand can match Disraeli’s close inner acquaintance with his subject. Statesmen, in short, have not the leisure to write. Alcibiades leaves no record of what Alcibiades did or suffered. By a glorious fluke, Peel gave this chance and Disraeli took it.
VIII
For a last word to-day—
Quite apart from genuine coruscation of genius, and almost as widely separating and casting from account that tinsel and tawdriness which all can detect, one feels a mistrust (gnawing, as it were, within our laurel) that even the best page of Disraeli does not belong to us. We cannot match it somehow with a racy page of Dryden, or of good Sir Walter Scott, of Izaak Walton, John Bunyan, grave Clarendon, Bolingbroke. Gibbon is artificial enough, heaven knows; yet somehow—and one remembers that he had served in the Hampshire Militia—the scent of the hawthorn is never more afar than a field away, even when he discourses of Tertullian or of Diocletian. From Disraeli’s prose—or rather from my sense of it—I can never dispel the smatch of burnt sandalwood, the smell of camels and the bazaar. He officiates, somehow—he, a Prime Minister, over an altar not ours—we admire the oracle, but its tongue is foreign.
Still his fame grows. I observe that, as the incense clears, each successive study of him tells something better. He stands in politics admittedly a champion; in literature, too, a figure certainly not among the greatest, yet as certainly one of the great.