Studies in Early Victorian Literature

by Frederic Harrison

The short juvenile drolleries of his restless youth are the least defective as works of art; and, being brief and simple jeux d'esprit of a rare order, they are entirely successful and infinitely amusing. Ixion in Heaven, The Infernal Marriage, and Popanilla, are astonishing products of a lad of twenty-three, who knew nothing of English society, and who had had neither regular education nor social opportunities. They have been compared with the social satirettes of Lucian, Swift, and Voltaire. It is true they have not the fine touch and exquisite polish of the witty Greek of Samosata, nor the subtle irony of Voltaire and Montesquieu, nor the profound grasp of the Dean. But they are full of wit, observation, sparkle, and fun. The style is careless and even incorrect, but it is full of point and life. The effects are rather stagey, and the smartness somewhat strained—that is, if these boyish trifles are compared with Candide and the Lettres Persanes. As pictures of English society, court, and manners in 1827 painted in fantastic apologues, they are most ingenious, and may be read again and again. The Infernal Marriage, in the vein of the Dialogues of the Dead, is the most successful. Ixion is rather broader, simpler, and much more slight, but is full of boisterous fun. Popanilla, a more elaborate satire in direct imitation of Gulliver's Travels, is neither so vivacious nor so easy as the smaller pieces, but it is full of wit and insight. Nothing could give a raw Hebrew lad the sustained imagination and passion of Jonathan Swift; but there are few other masters of social satire with whom the young genius of twenty-three can be compared. These three satires, which together do not fill 200 pages, are read and re-read by busy and learned men after nearly seventy years have passed. And that is in itself a striking proof of their originality and force.

It is not fair to one who wrote under the conditions of Benjamin Disraeli to take any account of his inferior work: we must judge him at his best. He avowedly wrote many pot-boilers merely for money; he began to write simply to make the world talk about him, and he hardly cared what the world might say; and he not seldom wrote rank bombast in open contempt for his reader, apparently as if he had made a bet to ascertain how much stuff the British public would swallow. Vivian Grey is a lump of impudence; The Young Duke is a lump of affectation; Alroy is ambitious balderdash. They all have passages and epigrams of curious brilliancy and trenchant observation; they have wit, fancy, and life scattered up and down their pages. But they are no longer read, nor do they deserve to be read. Contarini Fleming, Henrietta Temple, Venetia, are full of sentiment, and occasionally touch a poetic vein. They had ardent admirers once, even amongst competent judges. They may still be read, and they have scenes, descriptions, and detached thoughts of real charm, and almost of true beauty. They are not, in any sense, works of art; they are ill constructed, full of the mawkish gush of the Byronic fever, and never were really sincere and genuine products of heart and brain. They were show exercises in the Byronic mode. And, though we may still take them up for an hour for the occasional flashes of genius and wit they retain, no one believes that they can add much permanent glory to the name of Benjamin Disraeli.

Apart from the three early burlesques of which we have spoken—trifles indeed and crude enough, but trifles that sparkle with penetration and wit—the books on which Disraeli's reputation alone can be founded are Coningsby, Sybil, and Lothair. These all contain many striking epigrams, ingenious theories, original suggestions, vivacious caricatures, and even creative reflections, mixed, it must be admitted, with not a little transparent nonsense. But they are all so charged with bright invention, keen criticism, quaint paradox, they are so entirely unlike anything else in our recent literature, and they pierce, in a Voltairean way, so deeply to the roots of our social and political fabric, that they may long continue to be read. In the various prefaces, and especially in the general preface to Lothair (of October 1870), Disraeli has fully explained the origin and aim of these and his other works. It is written, as usual, with his tongue in his cheek, in that vein of semi-bombastic paradox which was designed to mystify the simple and to amuse the acuter reader. But there is an inner seriousness in it all; and, as it has a certain correspondence with his public career and achievements, it must be taken as substantially true. Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845) were written in the vigour of manhood and the early days of his political ambition, with an avowed purpose of founding a new party in Parliament. It must be admitted that they did to some extent effect their purpose—not immediately or directly, and only as part of their author's schemes. But the Primrose League and the New Tory Democracy of our day bear witness to the vitality of the movement which, fifty years ago, Disraeli propounded to a puzzled world. Lothair (1870) came twenty-five years later—when he had outlived his illusions; and in more artistic and more mellow tones he painted the weaknesses of a society that he had failed to inspire, but which it gratified his pride to command.

"Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred," says he, in his grandiose way, "form a real Trilogy." "The derivation and character of political parties,"—he goes on to explain—"was the subject of Coningsby." "The condition of the people which had been the consequence of them"—was the subject of Sybil. "The duties of the Church as a main remedial agency" and "the race who had been the founders of Christianity" [although, surely, friend Benjamin, if we are to believe the Gospels, the murderers and persecutors of Christ and His Apostles]—were the subjects of Tancred (1847). Tancred, though it has some highly amusing scenes, may be dismissed at once. Disraeli fought for the Chosen Race, their endowments and achievements, with wonderful courage and ingenuity. It was perhaps the cause which he had most deeply at heart, from its intimate relation to his own superb ambition and pride. But it has made no real way, nor has it made any converts, unless we count Daniel Deronda as amongst them. Thackeray's "Codlingsby" has almost extinguished "Sidonia." And the strange phantasmagoria of the Anglican Church, revivified by the traditions of Judaism, and ascending to the throne of St. Peter, is perhaps the most stupendous joke which even Disraeli had ever dared to perpetrate. In the preface to Lothair we read:—

The tradition of the Anglican Church was powerful. Resting on the Church of Jerusalem, modified by the divine school of Galilee, it would have found that rock of truth which Providence, by the instrumentality of the Semitic race, had promised to St. Peter.

Whatever this jargon may mean, the public has allowed it to fall flat. It seems to suggest that the Archbishop of Canterbury, by resuming the tradition of Caiaphas, as "modified" by the Sermon on the Mount, might oust the Pope of Rome as was foretold by the Divine young Jewish reformer when he called the fishermen of Galilee. It is difficult to believe that Disraeli himself was serious in all this. In the last scene, as Tancred is proposing to the lovely Jewess, their privacy is disturbed by a crowd of retainers around the papa and mamma of the young heir. The last lines of Tancred are these:—"The Duke and Duchess of Bellamont had arrived at Jerusalem." This is hardly the way in which to preach a New Gospel to a sceptical and pampered generation.

But, if the regeneration of the Church of England by a re-Judaising process and by return to the Targum of the Pharisees has proved abortive, it must be admitted that, from the political point of view, the conception announced in the "trilogy," and rhapsodically illustrated in Tancred—the conception of the Anglican Church reviving its political ascendancy and developing "the most efficient means of the renovation of the national spirit"—has not proved quite abortive. It shows astonishing prescience to have seen fifty years ago that the Church of England might yet become a considerable political power, and could be converted, by a revival of Mediaeval traditions, into a potent instrument of the New Tory Democracy. Whatever we may think about the strengthening of the Established Church from the point of view of intellectual solidity or influence with the nation, it can hardly be doubted that in the fifty years that have passed since the date of the "trilogy," the Church as a body has rallied to one party in the State, and has proved a potent ally of militant Imperialism and Tory Democracy. Lord Beaconsfield lived to witness that great transformation in the Church of the High and Dry Pluralists and the Simeonite parsons, which he had himself so powerfully organised in Parliament, in society, and on the platform. His successor to-day can count on no ally so sure and loyal as the Church. But it was a wonderful inspiration for a young man fifty years ago to perceive that this could be done—and to see the way in which it might be done.

Coningsby and Sybil at any rate were active forces in the formation of a definite political programme. And this was a programme which in Parliament and in the country their author himself had created, organised, and led to victory. It cannot be denied that they largely contributed to this result. And thus these books have this very remarkable and almost unique character. It would be very difficult to mention anything like a romance in any age or country which had ever effected a direct political result or created a new party. Don Quixote is said to have annihilated chivalry; Tartuffe dealt a blow at the pretensions of the Church; and the Marriage of Figaro at those of the old noblesse. It is possible that Bleak House gave some impulse to law reform, and Vanity Fair has relieved us of a good deal of snobbery. But no novel before or since ever created a political party and provided them with a new programme. Coningsby and Sybil really did this; and it may be doubted if it could have been done in any other way. "Imagination, in the government of nations" (we are told in the preface to Lothair) "is a quality not less important than reason." Its author trusts much "to a popular sentiment which rested on a heroic tradition and which was sustained by the high spirit of a free aristocracy."

Now this is a kind of party programme which it was almost impossible to propound on the platform or in Parliament. These imaginative and somewhat Utopian schemes of "changing back the oligarchy into a generous aristocracy round a real throne," of "infusing life and vigour into the Church as the trainer of the nation," of recalling the popular sympathies "to the principles of loyalty and religious reverence"—these were exactly the kind of new ideas which it would be difficult to expound in the House of Commons or in a towns-meeting. In the preface to Coningsby the author tells us that, after reflection, the form of fiction seemed to be the best method of influencing opinion. These books then present us with the unique example of an ambitious statesman resorting to romance as his means of reorganising a political party.

There is another side to this feature which is also unique and curiously full of interest. These romances are the only instances in which any statesman of the first rank, who for years was the ruling spirit of a great empire, has thrown his political conceptions and schemes into an imaginative form. And these books, from Vivian Grey (1825) to Endymion (1880), extend over fifty-five years; some being published before his political career seemed able to begin, some in the midst of it, and the later books after it was ended. In the grandiloquent style of the autobiographical prefaces, we may say that they recall to us the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the Political Testament of Richelieu, and the Conversations of Napoleon at St. Helena.