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.”