Chapter 11

Has our guide been merely blowing bubbles for our infantile amusement? Surely he has been too solemn. We could have sworn that some of the passages were written, if not with tears in his eyes, at least with a genuine sensibility to the solemn and romantic elements of life. Or was he carried away for a time into real mysticism for which he seeks to apologise by adopting the tone of the man of the world? Surely his satire is too keen, even when it causes the collapse of his own fancies. Even Coningsby and Lord Marney, the heroes of the former novels, appear in 'Tancred' as shrewd politicians, and obviously Tancred will accept the family seat when he gets back to his paternal mansion. We can only solve the problem, if we are prosaic enough to insist upon a solution, by accepting the theory of a double consciousness, and resolving to pray with the mystic, and sneer with the politician, as the fit takes us. It is an equal proof of intellectual dulness to be dead to either aspect of things. Let us agree that a brief sojourn in the world of fancy or in the world of blue-books is a qualification for a keener enjoyment of the other, and not brutally attempt to sever them by fixed lines. Each is best seen in the light reflected from the other, and we had best admit the fact without asking awkward questions; but they are blended after a perfectly original fashion in the strange phantasmagoria of 'Tancred.' Let the images of crusaders and modern sportsmen, Hebrew doctors and classical artists, mediæval monks and Anglican bishops, perform their strange antics before us, and the scenery shift from Manchester to Damascus, or Pall Mall to Bethany, in obedience to laws dictated by the fancy instead of the reason; let each of the motley actors be alternately the sham and the reality, and our moods shift as arbitrarily from grave to gay, from high-strung enthusiasm to mocking cynicism, and we shall witness a performance which is always amusing and original, and sometimes even poetical, and of which only the harshest realist will venture to whisper that, after all, it is a mere mystification.

But it is time to leave stories in which the critic, however anxious to observe the purely literary aspect, is constantly tempted to diverge into the political or theological theories suggested. The 'trilogy' was composed after Disraeli had become a force in politics, and the didactic tendency is constantly obtruding itself. In the period between 'Vivian Grey' (1826-7) and 'Coningsby' (1844) he had published several novels in which the prophet is lost, or nearly lost, in the artist. Of the 'Wondrous Tale of Alroy' it is enough to say that it is a very spirited attempt to execute an impossible task. All historical novels--except Scott's and Kingsley's--are a weariness to the flesh, and when the history is so remote from any association with modern feeling, even Mr. Disraeli's vivacity is not able to convert shadows into substances. An opposite error disturbs one's appreciation of 'Venetia.' Byron and Shelley were altogether too near to the writer to be made into heroes of fiction. The portraits are pale beside the originals; and though Lord Cadurcis and Marmion Herbert may have been happier men than their prototypes, they are certainly not so interesting. 'Henrietta Temple' and 'Contarini Fleming' may count as Mr. Disraeli's most satisfactory performances. He has worked without any secondary political purpose, and has, therefore, produced more harmonious results. The aim is ambitious, but consistent. 'Contarini Fleming' is the record of the development of a poetic nature--a theme, as we are told, 'virgin in the imaginative literature of every country.' The praises of Goethe, of Beckford, and of Heine gave a legitimate satisfaction to its author. 'Henrietta Temple' professes to be a love-story pure and simple. Love and poetry are certainly themes worthy of the highest art; and if Disraeli's art be not the highest, it is more effective when freed from the old alloy. The same intellectual temperament is indeed perceptible, though in this different field it does not produce quite the same results. One prominent tendency connects all his stories. When 'Lothair' made its appearance, critics were puzzled, not only by the old problem as to the seriousness of the writer, but by the extraordinary love of glitter. Were the palaces and priceless jewels and vast landed estates, distributed with such reckless profusion amongst the characters, intended as a covert satire upon the vulgar English worship of wealth, or did they imply a genuine instinct for the sumptuous? Disraeli would apparently parody the old epitaph, and write upon the monument of every ducal millionaire, 'Of such are the kingdom of heaven.' Vast landed estates and the Christian virtues, according to him, naturally go together; and he never dismisses a hero without giving him such a letter of credit as Sidonia bestowed upon Tancred. 'If the youth who bears this requires advances, let him have as much gold as would make the right-hand lion, on the first step of the throne of Solomon the king; and if he wants more, let him have as much as would form the lion that is on the left; and so on through every stair of the royal seat.' The theory that so keen a satirist of human follies must have been more or less ironical in his professed admiration for boundless wealth, though no doubt tempting, is probably erroneous. The simplest explanation is most likely to be the truest. Disraeli has a real, unfeigned delight in simple splendour, in 'ropes of pearls,' in priceless diamonds, gorgeous clothing, and magnificent furniture. The phenomenon is curious, but not uncommon. One may sometimes find an epicure who stills retains an infantile taste for sweetmeats, and is not afraid to avow it. Experience of the world taught Disraeli the hollowness of some objects of his early admiration, but it never so dulled his palate as to make pure splendour insipid to his taste. It is as easy to call this love of glitter vulgar, as to call his admiration for dukes snobbish; but the passion is too sincere to deserve any harsh name. Why should not a man have a taste for the society of dukes, or take a child's pleasure in bright colours for their own sake? There is nothing intrinsically virtuous in preferring a dinner of herbs to the best French cookery. So long as the taste is thoroughly genuine, and is not gratified at the cost of unworthy concessions, it ought not to be offensive.

Disraeli's pictures may be, or rather they certainly are, too gaudy in their colouring, but his lavish splendour is evidently prompted by a frank artistic impulse, and certainly implies no grovelling before the ordinary British duke. It is this love of splendour, it may be said parenthetically, combined with his admiration for the non-scientific type of intellect, which makes the Roman Catholic Church so strangely fascinating for Disraeli. His most virtuous heroes and heroines are members of old and enormously rich Catholic families. His poet, Contarini Fleming, falls prostrate before the splendid shrines of a Catholic chapel, all his senses intoxicated by solemn music and sweet incense and perfect pictures. Lothair, wanting a Sidonia, only escaped by a kind of miracle from the attractions of Rome. The sensibility to such influences has a singular effect upon Disraeli's modes of representing passion. He has frankly explained his theory. The peasant-noble of Wordsworth had learnt to know love 'in huts where poor men lie,' and a long catena of poetical authorities might be adduced in support of the principle. That is not Disraeli's view. 'Love,' he says, 'that can illumine the dark hovel and the dismal garret, that sheds a ray of enchanting light over the close and busy city, seems to mount with a lighter and more glittering pinion in an atmosphere as bright as its own plumes. Fortunate the youth, the romance of whose existence is placed in a scene befitting its fair and marvellous career; fortunate the passion that is breathed in palaces, amid the ennobling creations of surrounding art, and quits the object of its fond solicitude amidst perfumed gardens and in the shade of green and silent woods'--woods, that is, which ornament the stately parks of the aforesaid palaces. All Disraeli's passionate lovers--and they are very passionate--are provided with fitting scenery. The exquisite Sybil is allowed, by way of exception, to present herself for a moment in the graceful character of a sister of charity relieving a poor family in their garret; but we can detect at once the stamp of noble blood in every gesture, and a coronet is ready to descend upon her celestial brow. Everywhere else we make love in gilded palaces, to born princesses in gorgeous apparel; terraced gardens, with springing fountains and antique statues, are in the background; or at least an ancestral castle, with long galleries filled with the armour borne by our ancestors to the Holy Land, rises in cheery state, waiting to be restored on a scale of unprecedented magnificence by the dower of our affianced brides. And, of course, the passion is suitable to such accessories. 'There is no love but at first sight,'[5] says Disraeli; and, indeed, love at first sight is alone natural to such beings, on whom beauty and talent have been poured out as lavishly as wealth, and who need never condescend to thoughts of their natural needs. It is the love of Romeo and Juliet amidst the gardens of Verona; or rather the love of Aladdin of the wondrous lamp for some incomparable beauty, deserving to be enshrined in a palace erected by the hands of genii. The passion of the lover must be vivid and splendid enough to stand out worthily against so gorgeous a background; and it must flash and glitter, and dazzle our commonplace intellects.

In the 'Arabian Nights' the lover repeats a passage of poetry and then faints from emotion, and Disraeli's lovers are apt to be as demonstrative and ungovernable in their behaviour. Their happy audacity makes us forget some little defects in their conduct. Take, for example, the model love-story in 'Henrietta Temple.' Told by a cold and unimaginative person, it would run to the following effect:--Ferdinand Armine was the heir of a decayed Catholic family. Going into the army, he raised great sums, like other thoughtless young men, on the strength of his expectations from his maternal grandfather, a rich nobleman. The grandfather, dying, left his property to Armine's cousin, Katherine Grandison. Armine instantly made up his mind to marry his cousin and the property, and his creditors were quieted by news of his engagement. Meanwhile he met Henrietta Temple, and fell in love with her at first sight. In spite of his judicious reticence, Miss Temple heard of his engagement to Miss Grandison, and naturally broke off the match. She fell into a consumption, and he into a brain fever. The heroes of novels are never the worse for a brain fever or two, and young Armine, though Miss Grandison becomes aware of the Temple episode, has judgment enough to hide it from everybody else, and the first engagement is not ostensibly broken off. Nay, Armine still continues to raise loans on the strength of it--a proceeding which sounds very like obtaining money on false pretences. His creditors, however, become more pressing, and at last he gets into a sponging-house. Meanwhile Miss Temple has been cured of her consumption by the heir to a dukedom, and herself becomes the greatest heiress in England by an unexpected bequest. She returns from Italy, engaged to her new lover, and hears of her old lover's misfortunes. And then a 'happy thought' occurs to the two pairs of lovers. If Miss Temple's wealth had come earlier, she might have married Armine at first: why should she not do it now? It only requires an exchange of lovers, which is instantly effected. The heir to the dukedom marries the rich Miss Grandison; the rich Miss Temple marries Ferdinand Armine; and everybody lives in the utmost splendour ever afterwards. The moral to this edifying narrative appears to be given by the waiter at the sponging-house. 'It is only poor devils nabbed for their fifties and their hundreds that are ever done up,' says this keen observer. 'A nob was never nabbed for the sum you are, sir, and never went to the wall. Trust my experience, I never knowed such a thing.'

This judicious observation, translated into the language of art, gives Disraeli's secret. His 'nobs' are so splendid in their surroundings, such a magical light of wealth, magnificence, and rhetoric is thrown upon all their doings, that we are cheated into sympathy. Who can be hard upon a young man whose behaviour to his creditors may be questionable, but who is swept away in such a torrent of gorgeous hues? The first sight of Miss Temple is enough to reveal her dazzling complexion, her violet-tinted eyes, her lofty and pellucid brow, her dark and lustrous locks. Love for such a being is the 'transcendent and surpassing offspring of sheer and unpolluted sympathy.' It is a rapture and a madness; it is to the feelings of the ordinary mortal what sunlight is to moonlight, or wine to water. What wonder that Armine, 'pale and trembling, withdrew a few paces from the overwhelming spectacle, and leant against a tree in a chaos of emotion? A delicious and maddening impulse thrilled his frame; a storm raged in his soul; a big drop quivered on his brow; and a slight foam played upon his lip.' But 'the tumult of his mind gradually subsided; the fleeting memories, the saddening thoughts, that for a moment had coursed about in such wild order, vanished and melted away, and a feeling of bright serenity succeeded--a sense of beauty and joy, and of hovering and circumambient happiness.' In short, he asked the lady in to lunch. That is the love which can only be produced in palaces. Your Burns may display some warmth of feeling about a peasant-girl, and Wordsworth cherish the domestic affections in a cottage; but for the dazzling, brilliant forms of passion we must enter the world of magic, where diamonds are as plentiful as blackberries, and all surrounding objects are turned to gold by the alchemy of an excited imagination. The only difference is that, while other men assume that the commonest things will take a splendid colour as seen through a lover's eyes, Disraeli takes care that whatever his lovers see shall have a splendid colouring.

Once more, if we consent for the time to take our author's view--and that is the necessary condition for enjoying most literature--we must admit the vivacity and, at times, the real eloquence of Disraeli's rhetoric. In 'Contarini Fleming' he takes a still more ambitious flight, and with considerable success. Fleming, the embodiment of the poetic character, is, we might almost say, to other poets what Armine is to other lovers. He has the same love of brilliant effects, and the same absence of genuine tenderness. But one other qualification must be made. We feel some doubts as to his being a poet at all. He has indeed that amazing vitality with which Disraeli endows all his favourite heroes, and in which we may recognise the effervescence of youthful genius. But his genius is so versatile that we doubt its true destination. His first literary performance is to write a version of 'Vivian Grey,' a reckless and successful satire; his most remarkable escapade is to put himself at the head of a band of students, apparently inspired by Schiller's Robbers to emulate the career of Moor; his greatest feat is a sudden stroke of diplomacy which enables him to defeat the plans of more veteran statesmen. And when he has gone through his initiation, wooed and won his marvellous beauty, and lost her in an ideal island, the final shape of his aspirations is curiously characteristic. Having become rich quite unexpectedly--for he did not know that he was to be the hero of one of Disraeli's novels--he resolved to 'create a paradise.' He bought a Palladian pile, with a large estate and beautiful gardens. In this beautiful scene he intends to erect a Saracenic palace full of the finest works of modern and ancient art; and in time he hopes to 'create a scene which may rival in beauty and variety, though not in extent, the villa of Hadrian, whom I have always considered the most accomplished and sumptuous character of antiquity.' He has already laid the foundation of a tower which is to rise to a height of at least a hundred and fifty feet, and is to equal in solidity and design the most celebrated works of antiquity. Certainly the scheme is magnificent; but it is scarcely the ambition which one might have expected from a poet. Rather it is the design of a man endowed with a genuine artistic temperament, but with a strange desire to leave some showy and tangible memorial of his labours. His ambition is not to stir men's souls with profound thought, or to soften by some new harmonies the weary complaints of suffering humanity, but to startle the world by the splendid embodiment in solid marble of the most sumptuous dreams of a cultivated imagination. Contarini Fleming, indeed, as he shows by a series of brilliant travellers' sketches, is no mean master of what may be called poetical prose. His pictures of life and scenery are vivacious, rapid, and decisive. In later years, the habit of parliamentary oratory seems to have injured Disraeli's style. In 'Lothair' there is a good deal of slipshod verbiage. But in these earlier stories the style is generally excellent till it becomes too ambitious. It has a kind of metallic glitter, brilliant, sparkling with numerous flashes of wit and fancy, and never wanting in sharpness of effect, though it may be deficient in delicacy. Yet the author, who is of necessity to be partly identified with the hero of 'Contarini Fleming,' is distinctly not a poet; and the incapacity is most evident when he endeavours to pass the inexorable limits. The distinction between poetry and rhetoric is as profound as it is undefinable. A true poet, as possessing an exquisite sensibility to the capacities of his instrument, does not try to get the effects of metre when he is writing without its restrictions and its advantages. Disraeli shows occasionally a want of this delicacy of perception by breaking into a kind of compromise between the two which can only be called Ossianesque. The effect, for example, of such a passage as the following is, to my taste at least, simply grotesque:--

'Still the courser onward rushes; still his mighty heart supports him. Season and space, the glowing soil, the burning ray, yield to the tempest of his frame, the thunder of his nerves, and lightning of his veins.

'Food or water they have none. No genial fount, no graceful tree, rise with their pleasant company. Never a beast or bird is there, in that hoary desert bare. Nothing breaks the almighty stillness. Even the jackal's felon cry might seem a soothing melody. A grey wild cat, with snowy whiskers, out of a withered bramble stealing, with a youthful snake in its ivory teeth, in the moonlight gleams with glee. This is their sole society.'

And so on. Some great writers have made prose as melodious as verse; and Disraeli can at times follow their example successfully. But one likes to know what one is reading; and the effect of this queer expression is as if, in the centre of a solemn march, were incorporated a few dancing-steps, _à propos_ to nothing, and then subsiding into a regular pace. Milton wrote grand prose and grand verse; but you are never uncertain whether a fragment of 'Paradise Lost' may or may not have been inserted by mere accident in the 'Areopagitica.'

Not to dwell upon such minor defects, nobody can read 'Contarini Fleming' or 'Henrietta Temple' without recognising the admirable talent and exuberant vitality of the author. They have the faults of juvenile performances; they are too gaudy; the author has been tempted to turn aside too frequently in search of some brilliant epigram; he has mistaken bombast for eloquence, and mere flowery brilliance for warmth of emotion. But we might hope that longer experience and more earnest purpose might correct such defects. Alas! in the year of their publication, Disraeli first entered Parliament. His next works comprised the trilogy, where the artistic aim has become subordinate to the political or biological; and some thirty years of parliamentary labours led to 'Lothair,' of which it is easiest to assume that it is a practical joke on a large scale, or a prolonged burlesque upon Disraeli's own youthful performances. May one not lament the degradation of a promising novelist into a Prime Minister?

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Perhaps I ought to substitute 'Lord Beaconsfield' for Disraeli; but I am writing of the author of 'Coningsby,' rather than of the author of 'Endymion:' and I will therefore venture to preserve the older name.

[5] 'He never loved that loved not at first sight,' says Marlowe, and Shakespeare after him. I cannot say whether this be an undesigned literary coincidence or an appropriation. Disraeli, we know, was skilful in the art of annexation. One or two instances may be added. Here is a clear case of borrowing. Fuller says in the character of the good sea-captain in the 'Holy State'--'Who first taught the water to imitate the creatures on land, so that the sea is the stable of horse-fishes, the stye of hog-fishes, the kennel of dog-fishes, and in all things, the sea is the ape of the land?' Essper George, in 'Vivian Grey,' says to the sea: 'O thou indifferent ape of earth, what art thou, O bully ocean, but the stable of horse-fishes, the stall of cow-fishes, the stye of hog-fishes, and the kennel of dog-fishes?' Other cases may be more doubtful. On one occasion, Disraeli spoke of the policy of his opponents as a combination of 'blundering and plundering.' The jingle was thought to be adapted from a previous epigram about 'meddling and muddling;' but here is the identical phrase: Coleridge wrote in the 'Courier:' 'The writer, whilst abroad, was once present when most bitter complaints were made of the ----government. "Government!" exclaimed a testy old captain of a Mediterranean trading-vessel, "call it _blunderment_ or _plunderment_ or what you like--only not a _government_!"'--Coleridge's 'Essays on his own Times,' p. 893. Disraeli is sometimes credited with the epigram in 'Lothair' about critics being authors who have failed. I know not who said this first; but it was certainly not Disraeli. Landor makes Porson tell Southey: 'Those who have failed as writers turn reviewers.' The classical passage is in Sainte-Beuve. Balzac, he says, said somewhere of a sculptor who had become discouraged: 'Redevenu artiste _in partibus_, il avait beaucoup de succès dans les salons, il était consulté par beaucoup d'amateurs; _il passa critique comme tous les impuissants qui mentent à leurs débuts_.' Sainte-Beuve, naturally indignant at a phrase aimed against his craft, if not against himself, says that this may be true of a sculptor or painter who deserts his art in order to talk; 'mais, dans l'ordre de la pensée, cette parole de M. de Balzac qui revient souvent sous la plume de toute une école de jeunes littérateurs, est à la fois (je leur en demande pardon) une injustice et une erreur.'--'Causeries du Lundi,' vol. ii. p. 455. A very similar phrase is to be found in a book where one would hardly look for such epigrams, Marryat's 'King's Own.' But to trace such witticisms to their first source is a task for 'Notes and Queries.'

_MASSINGER_