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.