Charles Dickens and other Victorians

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

But I recall myself to my purpose; which in two following lectures shall be as literary, as merely critical, as I can keep it. To-day I have set out the theme and tried to show you how it had perforce to occupy men’s minds and—since artists and imaginative writers must have feelings as well as intellect—almost to dominate our literature and art in the last century. In that domination of interest you will find implicit, and will easily evolve for yourselves, the reason why the novel in particular, being a social form of art and lending itself in so many ways to episode, discussion, even direct preaching, became political as it never was in the days of Richardson and Fielding, Scott and Jane Austen. The preponderance of the theme being granted, I next propose to examine how it took possession of two persons of genius: a man and a woman; the man assertive, personally ambitious, full of fire and opulent phrase: the woman staid, self-abnegating, to me wearing the quiet, with the intensity, of a noble statue. I can conceive, if one would trace in literature the operation of a compelling idea, no two exponents more essentially disparate than Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell.

DISRAELI

I

For two reasons or (shall we say) against two main obstacles, both serious, Benjamin Disraeli found it hard to gain the ear of Parliament and, having gained it, had yet a long fight before attaining office. To begin with, his race and reputation were against him. He was a Jew, and he had written novels. He was admittedly clever to excess: but cleverness, specially when tainted by literary skill, is, of all others, the reputation which our British Senate most profoundly (and perhaps on the whole wisely) distrusts. That the House “hates a man who makes it think” was the observation of a cynic, no doubt. But I have also heard it said by one long a member of it, that a speaker there must always count on somebody—he knows not whom—who knows the subject more thoroughly than he. Its instinct being for solidity, it shrinks from brilliance as a danger: and this was specially true of the party to which Disraeli allied himself—upon which, we may say, he thrust himself—a Jew, an adventurer, an ambitious, esurient fellow without any stake in the country. What had a party, which didn’t in the least object to being called stupid, to gain by the support of such an outsider?

And it is obvious that, for Parliamentary success, Disraeli had to overcome something more serious—a certain bumptiousness of manner, a youthful confidence and ease in Sion, helped out by elaborate ringlets, mannerisms and a foppish dress very much overdone: an opulence of speech and waistcoat, both jarring on the very men—and probably most upon these—into whose less-oiled heads he was fighting to drive some ideas. There is a great deal of tactlessness in the story of Disraeli, right up to the moment of Peel’s fall. But the story witnesses not only to a growing mastery, won by amazing courage, over the House but—better—to a discipline won over himself.

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.