It is not easy for a man whose sovereign ambition is seen to be leading him with great success in a particular direction to obtain due credit for what he accomplishes with less manifest success in another. There is no doubt that Disraeli as an author has, at all events until very lately, suffered from the splendour of his fame as a politician. But he was an author long before he became a statesman, and it certainly is a little curious that even in his youth, although he was always commercially successful with his books, they were never, as we say, "taken seriously" by the critics. His earliest novels were largely bought, and produced a wide sensation, but they were barely accepted as contributions to literature. If we look back to the current criticism of those times, we find such a book as Dacre, a romance by the Countess of Morley, which is now absolutely forgotten, treated with a dignity and a consideration never accorded to The Young Duke or to Henrietta Temple. Even Disraeli's satiric squibs, in the manner of Lucian and Swift, which seem to us among the most durable ornaments of light literature in the days of William IV., were read and were laughed at, but were not critically appraised.
So, too, at the middle period of Disraeli's literary life, such books as Coningsby and Tancred were looked upon as amusing commentaries on the progress of a strenuous politician, not by any means, or by any responsible person, as possible minor classics of our language. And at his third period, the ruling criticism of the hour was aghast at faults which now entertain us, and was blind to sterling merits which we are now ready to acknowledge. Shortly after his death, perhaps his most brilliant apologist was fain to admit that if Disraeli had been undistinguished as a speaker, his novels would have been "as the flowers of the field, charming for the day which was passing over them, and then forgotten." It is only since the beginning of the present century that a conviction has been gaining ground that some of these books were in themselves durable, not because they were the work of a man who became Prime Minister of England and made his sovereign Empress of India, but as much or as little as if they had been composed by a recluse in a hermitage. This impression has now become so general with enlightened critics that the danger seems to be that we should underrate certain excesses of rhetoric and the Corinthian mode the errors of which used to be over-emphasised, but should not, in a comparative survey of Victorian literature, be neglected as serious drawbacks to our perfect enjoyment of the high-spirited, eloquent, and ardent writings of Benjamin Disraeli. It is in this spirit of moderation that I now attempt a rapid sketch of his value as an English author.
I
There is, perhaps, no second example of a writer whose work is divided, as is that of Disraeli, into three totally distinct periods. Other authors, as for example, the poet Crabbe, and in a less marked degree Rogers, have abandoned the practice of writing for a considerable number of years, and then have resumed it. But the case of Disraeli seems to be unique as that of a man who pursued the writing, of books with great ardour during three brief and independent spaces of time. We have his first and pre-Parliamentarian period, which began with Vivian Grey (1826) and closed with Venetia (1837). We have a second epoch, opening with Coningsby (1844) and ending with Tancred (1847), during which time he was working out his political destiny; and we have the novels which he wrote after he had won the highest distinction in the State. Certain general characteristics are met with in all these three classes, but they have also differences which require to be noted and accounted for. It will, therefore, be convenient to treat them successively.
As oblivion scatters its poppy over the prose fiction of the reigns of George IV. and William IV., it becomes in creasingly dangerous that criticism should take the early "fashionable" novels of Disraeli as solitary representations of literary satire or observation. It is true that to readers of to-day this class of romance is exclusively suggestive of Vivian Grey and its fellows, with perhaps the Pelham of Bulwer. But this was not the impression of the original readers of these novels, who were amused by them, but found nothing revolutionary in their treatment of society. In the course of The Young Duke, written in 1829, Disraeli suggests an amiable rivalry with the romances "written by my friends Mr. Ward and Mr. Bulwer." The latter name had only just risen above the horizon, but that of Plumer Ward, forgotten as it now is, was one to conjure by. Ward was the author of Tremaine (1825) and De Vere (1827), two novels of the life of a modern English gentleman, which seems to a reader to-day to be insipid and dull enough. But they contained "portraits" of public persons, they undertook to hold the mirror up to the political and fashionable world of London, and they lashed that fastidiousness which was considered to be the foible of the age.
The books of Plumer Ward, who was an accomplished personage in advancing years, were treated with marked distinction in the press, and were welcomed by critics who deigned to take little notice of even such books as Granby and Dacre. But the stories of the youthful Disraeli belonged to a class held in still less esteem than those just mentioned. They had to hold their own as best they might in rivalry with a huge flight of novels of fashionable life, all of them curiously similar in general treatment. Above these the romances of Plumer Ward rose in a sort of recognised dignity, as two peaks around which were crowded innumerable hillocks. It is necessary to recall readers of to-day, who think of Vivian Grey as a work of amazing novelty, to the fact that the genre it represents to us was one which had been lifted into high credit the year before by the consecrated success of Tremaine, and was at that moment cultivated by a multitude of minor novelists.
There was, however, a distinction, and it lay in the greater fund of animal spirits which Disraeli brought to his business. Vivian Grey was absurd, but it was fresh and popular, and it pleased at once. As the opening work of a literary career, it promised well; the impertinent young gentleman dashed off to Parnassus at a gallop. It was a bold bid for personal distinction, which the author easily perceived already to be "the only passport to the society of the great in England." Vivian Grey is little more than a spirited and daring boy's book; Disraeli himself called it "a hot and hurried sketch." It was a sketch of what he had never seen, yet of what he had begun to foresee with amazing lucidity. It is a sort of social fairy-tale, where every one has exquisite beauty, limitless wealth, and exalted rank, where the impossible and the hyperbolic are the only homely virtues. There has always been a tendency to exalt Vivian Grey at the expense of The Young Duke (1831), Disraeli's next leading permanence; and, indeed, the former has had its admirers who have preferred it to all the others in this period. The difference is, however, not so marked as might be supposed. In The Young Duke the manner is not so burlesque, but there is the same roughness of execution, combined with the same rush and fire. In either book, what we feel to-day to be the great objection to our enjoyment is the lack of verisimilitude. Who can believe in the existence of persons whose titles are the Earl of Fitz-Pompey and Baron Deprivyseal, or whose names are Lady Aphrodite and Sir Carte Blanche? The descriptions are "high-falutin" beyond all endurance, and there is particularly noticeable a kind of stylistic foppery, which is always hovering between sublimity and a giggle.
But here is an example, from Vivian Grey, of Disraeli's earliest manner:—
"After a moment had passed, he was pouring forth in a rapid voice, and incoherent manner, such words as men speak only once. He spoke of his early follies, his misfortunes, his misery; of his matured views, his settled principles, his plans, his prospects, his hopes, his happiness, his bliss; and when he had ceased, he listened, in his turn, to some small still words, which made him the happiest of human beings. He bent down, he kissed the soft silken cheek which now he could call his own. Her hand was in his; her head sank upon his breast. Suddenly she clung to him with a strong clasp. 'Violet! my own, my dearest; you are overcome. I have been rash, I have been imprudent. Speak, speak, my beloved! say, you are not ill!'
"She spoke not, but clung to him with a fearful strength, her head still upon his breast, her full eyes closed. Alarmed, he raised her off the ground, and bore her to the river-side. Water might revive her. But when he tried to lay her a moment on the bank, she clung to him gasping, as a sinking person clings to a stout swimmer. He leant over her; he did not attempt to disengage her arms; and, by degrees, by very slow degrees, her grasp loosened. At last her arms gave way and fell by her side, and her eyes partly opened.