Charles Dickens and other Victorians

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

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....