But in Contarini Fleming we detect a new flavour, and it is a very fortunate one. The bitterness of Swift was never quite in harmony with the genius of Disraeli, but the irony of Voltaire was. The effect of reading Zadig and Candide was the completion of the style of Disraeli; that "strange mixture of brilliant fantasy and poignant truth" which he rightly perceived to be the essence of the philosophic contes of Voltaire, finished his own intellectual education. Henceforth he does not allow his seriousness to overweigh his liveliness; if he detects a tendency to bombast, he relieves it with a brilliant jest. Count de Moltke and the lampoons offer us a case to our hand; "he was just the old fool who would make a cream cheese," says Contarini, and the startled laugh which greets him is exactly of the same order as those which were wont to reward the statesman's amazing utterances in Parliament.
In spite of a certain undeniable insipidity, the volumes of Contarini Fleming cannot but be read with pleasure. The mixture of Byron and Voltaire is surprising, but it produces some agreeable effects. There is a dash of Shelley in it, too, for the life on the isle of Paradise with Alcesté Contarini is plainly borrowed from Epiphsychidion. Disraeli does not even disdain a touch of "Monk" Lewis without his voluptuousness, and of Mrs. Radcliffe without her horrors, for he is bent on serving up an olio entirely in the taste of the day. But through it all he is conspicuously himself, and the dedication to beauty and the extraordinary intellectual exultation of such a book as Contarini Fleming are borrowed from no exotic source.
It is impossible to overlook the fascination which Venice exercises over Disraeli in these early novels. Contarini's great ambition was to indite "a tale which should embrace Venice and Greece." Byron's Life and Letters and the completion of Rogers' Italy with Turner's paradisaical designs had recently awakened to its full the romantic interest which long had been gathering around "the sun-girt city." Whenever Disraeli reaches Venice his style improves, and if he mourns over her decay, his spirits rise when he has to describe her enchantments by moonlight. He reserves his most delicate effects for Greece and Venice:—
"A Grecian sunset! The sky is like the neck of a dove! the rocks and waters are bathed with a violet light. Each moment it changes; each moment it shifts into more graceful and more gleaming shadows. And the thin white moon is above all; the thin white moon, followed by a single star, like a lady by a page."
There are many passages as sumptuous as this in Venetia, the romance about Byron and Shelley, which Disraeli was thought indiscreet in publishing so soon after Byron's death. In the story the heroine Venetia is the daughter of Shelley (Marmion Herbert) and the bride of Byron (Lord Cadurcis). Marmion is a most melodramatic figure, but the indiscretions are not noticeable nowadays, while the courage with which the reviled and hated Shelley is described in the preface to Lord Lyndhurst as one of "the most renowned and refined spirits that have adorned these our latter days" is highly characteristic of Disraeli. The reception of Lord Cadurcis in the House of Peers and the subsequent riot in Palace Yard mark, perhaps, the highest point in direct narrative power which the novelist had yet reached; but Venetia was not liked, and Disraeli withdrew from literature into public life.
II
When Disraeli resumed the art of the novelist, he was no longer talking of what lay outside his experience when he touched on politics. In 1837 he had entered the House at last, as Member for Maidstone, and although his enemies roared him down on the first occasion of his rising to speak, he soon learned how to impose his voice on Parliament. In 1839 his declaration that "the rights of labour are as sacred as the rights of property" made him famous, and in 1841 he was one of Sir Robert Peel's Conservative army in the House. Then followed the formation of the Young England Party, with Disraeli as one of its leaders; these men broke away from Peel, and held that the Tory Party required stringent reform from within. It was in 1843 that Henry Thomas Hope, of Deepdene, urged, at a meeting of the Young Englanders, the expediency of Disraeli's "treating in a literary form those views and subjects which were the matter of their frequent conversations." Disraeli instantly returned to literary composition, and produced in quick succession the four books which form the second section of his work as an author; these are Coningsby, Sybil, Tancred, and the Life of Lord George Bentinck.
In this group of books we observe, in the first place, a great advance in vitality and credibility over the novels of the earlier period. Disraeli is now describing what he knows, no longer what he hopes in process of time to know. He writes from within, no longer from without the world of political action. These three novels and a biography are curiously like one another in form, and all equally make a claim to be considered not mere works of entertainment, but serious contributions to political philosophy. The assumption is borne out by the character of the books, each of which had a definite aim and purpose. Coningsby was designed to make room for new talent in the Tory Party by an unflinching attack on the "mediocrities." In Sybil the heartless abuse of capital and the vices of class distinction are exposed. Tancred is a vision of better things to follow upon the reforms already indicated. In Lord George Bentinck, under the guise of a record of the struggle between Protection and Free Trade, we have a manual of personal conduct as applied to practical politics.
In all these works narrative pure and simple inclines to take a secondary place. It does so least in Coningsby which, as a story, is the most attractive book of Disraeli's middle period, and one of the most brilliant studies of political character ever published. The tale is interspersed with historical essays, which impede its progress but add to its weight and value. Where, however, the author throws himself into his narrative, the advance he has made in power, and particularly in truth of presentment, is very remarkable. In the early group of his novels he had felt a great difficulty in transcribing conversations so as to produce a natural and easy effect. He no longer, in Coningsby, is confronted by this artificiality. His dialogues are now generally remarkable for their ease and nature. The speeches of Rigby (who represents John Wilson Croker), of Lord Monmouth (who stands for Lord Hertford), of the Young Englanders themselves, of the laughable chorus of Taper and Tadpole, who never "despaired of the Commonwealth," are often extremely amusing. In Coningsby we have risen out of the rose-coloured mist of unreality which hung over books like The Young Duke and Henrietta Temple. The agitated gentleman whose peerage hangs in the balance, and who on hearing that the Duke of Wellington is with the King breathes out in a sigh of relief "Then there is a Providence," is a type of the subsidiary figure which Disraeli had now learned to introduce with infinite lightness of irony.