Young Bulwer and Disraeli.
It was some years before the passage of the Reform bill, and before the death of George IV., that Bulwer[57] blazed out in Pelham (1828), The Disowned, and Devereux, making conquest of the novel-reading town, at a time when Quentin Durward (1823) was not an old book, and Woodstock (1826) still fresh. And if Pelhamism had its speedy subsidence, the same writer put such captivating historic garniture and literary graces about the Italian studies of Rienzi, and of the Last Days of Pompeii, as carry them now into most libraries, and insure an interested reading—notwithstanding a strong sensuous taint and sentimental extravagances.
He had scholarship; he had indefatigable industry; he had abounding literary ambitions and enthusiasms, but he had no humor; I am afraid he had not a very sensitive conscience; and he had no such pervading refinement of literary taste as to make his work serve as the exemplar for other and honester workers.
Benjamin Disraeli[58] in those days overmatched him in cravats and in waistcoats, and was the veriest fop of all fop-land. No more beautiful accessory could be imagined to the drawing-room receptions over which Lady Blessington presided, and of which the ineffable Comte d’Orsay was a shining and a fixed light, than this young Hebraic scion of a great Judean house—whose curls were of the color of a raven’s wing, and whose satin trumpery was ravishing!
And yet—this young foppish Disraeli, within fifty years, held the destinies of Great Britain in his hand, and had endowed the Queen with the grandest title she had ever worn—that of Empress of India. Still further, in virtue of his old friendship for his fellow fop Bulwer, he sends the son of that novelist (in the person of the second Lord Lytton) to preside over a nation numbering two hundred millions of souls. Whoever can accomplish these ends with such a people as that of Great Britain must needs have something in him beyond mere fitness for the pretty salons of my Lady Blessington.
And what was it? Whatever you may count it, there is surely warrant for telling you something of his history and his antecedents: Three or more centuries ago—at the very least—a certain Jew of Cordova, in Spain, driven out by the terrors of the Inquisition, went to Venice—established himself there in merchandise, and his family throve there for two hundred years. A century and a half ago,—when the fortunes of Venice were plainly on the wane—the head of this Jewish family—Benjamin Disraeli (grandfather of the one of whom we speak) migrated to England. This first English Benjamin met with success on the Exchange of London, and owing to the influences of his wife (who hated all Jewry) he discarded his religious connection with Hebraism, went to the town of Enfield, a little north of London—with a good fortune, and lived there the life of a retired country gentleman. He had a son Isaac, who devoted himself to the study of literature, and showed early strong bookish proclivities—very much to the grief of his father, who had a shrewd contempt for all such follies. Yet the son Isaac persisted, and did little else through a long life, save to prosecute inquiries about the struggles of authors and the lives of authors and the work of authors—all ending in that agglomeration which we know as the Curiosities of Literature—a book which sixty years since used to be reckoned a necessary part of all well-equipped libraries; but which—to tell truth—has very little value; being without any method, without fulness, and without much accuracy. It is very rare that so poor a book gets so good a name, and wears it so long.
Oddly enough, this father, who had devoted a life to the mere gossip of literature, as it were, warns his son Benjamin against literary pursuits (he wrote three or four novels indeed,[59] but they are never heard of), and the son studied mostly under private tutors; there is no full or trustworthy private biography of him: but we know that in the years 1826-1827—only a short time before the Lady Blessington coterie was in its best feather—he wrote a novel called Vivian Grey,—the author being then under twenty-two—which for a time divided attention with Pelham. In club circles it made even more talk. It is full of pictures of people of the day; Brougham and Wilson Croker, and Southey, and George Canning, and Mrs. Coutts and Lady Melbourne (Caroline Lamb), all figure in it. He never gave over, indeed, putting portraits in his books—as Goldwin Smith can tell us. The larger Reviews were coy of praise and coy of condemnation: indeed ’twas hard to say which way it pointed—socially or politically; but, for the scandal-mongers, there was in it very appetizing meat. He became a lion of the salons; and he enjoyed the lionhood vastly. Chalon[60] painted him in that day—a very Adonis—gorgeous in velvet coat and in ruffled shirt.
But he grew tired of England and made his trip of travel; it followed by nearly a score of years after that of Childe Harold, and was doubtless largely stimulated by it; three years he was gone—wandering over all the East, as well as Europe. He came back with an epic (published 1834), believing that it was to fill men’s minds, and to conquer a place for him among the great poets of the century. In this he was dismally mistaken; so he broke his lyre, and that was virtually the last of his poesy. There came, however, out of these journeyings, besides the poem, the stories of Contarini Fleming, of The Young Duke, and The Wondrous Tale of Alroy. These kept his fame alive, but seemed after all only the work of a man playing with literature, rather than of one in earnest.
With ambition well sharpened now, by what he counted neglect, he turned to politics; as the son of a country gentleman of easy fortune, it was not difficult to make place for himself. Yet, with all the traditions of a country gentleman about him, in his first moves he was not inclined to Toryism; indeed, he startled friends by his radicalism—was inclined to shake hands at the outset with the arch-agitator O’Connell; but not identifying himself closely with either party; and so, to the last it happened that his sympathies were halved in most extraordinary way; he had the concurrence of the most staid, Toryish, and conservative of country voters; and no man could, like himself, bring all the jingoes of England howling at his back. Indeed, nothing is more remarkable in his career than his shrewd adaptation of policy to meet existing, or approaching tides of feeling; he does not avow great convictions of duty, and stand by them; but he toys with convictions; studies the weakness, as he does the power, of those with him or against him; shifts his ground accordingly; rarely lacking poise, and the attitude of seeming steadfastness; whipping with his scourge of a tongue the little lapses of his adversaries till they shrill all over the kingdom; and putting his own triumphs—great or small—into such scenic combination, with such beat of drum, and blare of trumpet, as to make all England break out into bravos.[61] There was not that literary quality in his books, either early or late, which will give to them, I think, a very long life; but there was in the man a quality of shrewdness and of power which will be long remembered—perhaps not always to his honor.
I do not yield to any in admiration for the noble and philanthropic qualities which belong to the venerable, retired statesman of Hawarden; yet I cannot help thinking that if such a firm and audacious executive hand as belonged to Lord Beaconsfield, had—in the season of General Gordon’s stress at Khartoum—controlled the fleets and armies of Great Britain, there would have been quite other outcome to the sad imbroglio in the Soudan. When war is afoot, the apostles of peace are the poorest of directors.
I go back for a moment to that Blessington Salon—in order to close her story. There was a narrowed income—a failure of her jointure—a shortening of her book sales; but, notwithstanding, there was a long struggle to keep that brilliant little court alive. One grows to like so much the music and the fêtes and the glitter of the chandeliers, and the unction of flattering voices! But at last the ruin came; on a sudden the sheriffs were there; and clerks with their inventories in place of the “Tokens” and “annuals”—with their gorgeous engravings by Finden & Heath—which the Mistress had exploited; and she hurried off—after the elegant D’Orsay—to Paris, hoping to rehabilitate herself, on the Champs Elysées, under the wing of Louis Napoleon, just elected President. I chanced to see her in her coupé there, on a bright afternoon early in 1849—with elegant silken wraps about her and a shimmer of the old kindly smile upon her shrunken face—dashing out to the Bois; but within three months there was another sharp change; she—dead, and her pretty decolleté court at an end forever.