In judging these remarkable works, we ought to remember that they are not primarily romances at all, that they do not compete with genuine romances, and they ought to be read for the qualities they have, not for those in which they fail. They are in part autobiographical sketches, meditations on society, historical disquisitions, and political manifestoes. They are the productions of a statesman aiming at a practical effect, not of a man of letters creating a work of imaginative art. The creative form is quite subsidiary and subordinate. It would be unreasonable to expect in them elaborate drawing of character, complex plot, or subtle types of contemporary life. Their aim is to paint the actual political world, to trace its origin, and to idealise its possible development. And this is done, not by an outside man of letters, but by the very man who had conquered a front place in this political world, and who had more or less realised his ideal development. They are almost the only pictures of the inner parliamentary life we have; and they are painted by an artist who was first and foremost a great parliamentary power, of consummate experience and insight. If the artistic skill were altogether absent, we should not read them at all, as nobody reads Lord Russell's dramas or the poems of Frederick the Great. But the art, though unequal and faulty, is full of vigour, originality, and suggestion. Taken as a whole, they are quite unique.
Coningsby; or, the New Generation, was the earliest and in some ways the best of the trilogy. It is still highly diverting as a novel, and, as we see to-day, was charged with potent ideas and searching criticism. It was far more real and effective as a romance than anything Disraeli had previously written. There are scenes and characters in the story which will live in English literature. Thackeray could hardly have created more living portraits than "Rigby," "Tadpole," and "Taper," or "Lord Monmouth." These are characters which are household words with us like "Lord Steyne" and "Rawdon Crawley." The social pictures are as realistic as those of Trollope, and now and then as bright as those of Thackeray. The love-making is tender, pretty, and not nearly so mawkish as that of "Henrietta Temple" and "Venetia." There is plenty of wit, epigram, squib, and bon mot. There is almost none of that rhodomontade which pervades the other romances, except as to "Sidonia" and the supremacy of the Hebrew race—a topic on which Benjamin himself was hardly sane. Coningsby, as a novel, is sacrificed to its being a party manifesto and a political programme first and foremost. But as a novel it is good. It is the only book of Disraeli's in which we hardly ever suspect that he is merely trying to fool us. It is not so gay and fantastic as Lothair. But, being far more real and serious, it is perhaps the best of Disraeli's novels.
As a political manifesto, Coningsby has been an astonishing success. The grand idea of Disraeli's life was to struggle against what he called the "Venetian Constitution," imposed and maintained by the "Whig Oligarchy." As Radical, as Tory, as novelist, as statesman, his ruling idea was "to dish the Whigs," in Lord Derby's historic phrase. And he did "dish the Whigs." The old Whigs have disappeared from English politics. They have either amalgamated with the Tories, become Unionist Conservatives, henchmen of Lord Salisbury, or else have become Gladstonians and Radicals. The so-called Whigs of 1895, if any politicians so call themselves, are far more Tory than the Whigs of 1844, and the Tories of 1895 are far more democratic than the Whigs of 1844. This complete transformation is very largely due to Disraeli himself.
Strictly speaking, Disraeli has eliminated from our political arena both "Whig" and "Tory," as understood in the old language of our party history. And the first sketch of the new policy was flung upon an astonished public in Coningsby, just fifty years ago. No doubt, the arduous task of educating the Conservative Party into the new faith of Tory Democracy was not effected by Coningsby alone. But it may be doubted if Mr. Disraeli would have accomplished it by his speeches without his writings. As a sketch of the inner life of the parliamentary system of fifty years ago, Coningsby is perfect and has never been approached. Both Thackeray and Trollope have painted Parliament and public life so far as it could be seen from a London club. But Disraeli has painted it as it was known to a man who threw his whole life into it, and who was himself a consummate parliamentary leader.
Sybil; or, the Two Nations, the second of the trilogy (1845), was devoted, he tells us, "to the condition of the people," that dismal result of the "Venetian Constitution" and of the "Whig Oligarchy" which he had denounced in Coningsby. Sybil was perhaps the most genuinely serious of all Disraeli's romances; and in many ways it was the most powerful. Disraeli himself was a man of sympathetic and imaginative nature who really felt for the suffering and oppressed. He was tender-hearted as a man, however sardonic as a politician. He had seen and felt the condition of the people in 1844. It was a time of cruel suffering which also stirred the spirits of Carlyle, Mill, Cobden, and Bright. It led to the new Radicalism of which Mr. Gladstone and Mr. John Morley are eminent types. But the genius of Disraeli saw that it might also become the foundation of a new Toryism; and Sybil was the first public manifesto of the new departure. The political history of the last fifty years is evidence of his insight that, to recover their political ascendancy, a Conservative Party must take in hand "the condition of the people," under the leadership of "a generous aristocracy," and in alliance with a renovated Church. These are the ideas of Sybil, though in the novel they are adumbrated in a dim and fantastic way. As a romance, Sybil is certainly inferior to Coningsby. As a political manifesto, it has had an almost greater success, and the movement that it launched is far from exhausted even yet. One of Disraeli's comrades in the new programme of 1844-5 was a member of the last Conservative cabinet. And when we consider all the phases of Tory Democracy, Socialistic Toryism, and the current type of Christian Socialism, we may come to regard the ideas propounded in Sybil as not quite so visionary as they appeared to the Whigs, Radicals, Free Traders, and Benthamites of fifty years ago.
In Lothair, which did not appear until twenty-five years after Sybil, we find an altered and more mellow tone, as of a man who was playing with his own puppets, and had no longer any startling theories to propound or political objects to win. For this reason it is in some ways the most complete and artistic of Disraeli's romances. The plot is not suspended by historical disquisitions on the origin of the Whig oligarchy, by pictures of the House of Commons that must weary those who know nothing about it, and by enthusiastic appeals to the younger aristocracy to rouse itself and take in hand the condition of the people. In 1870, Mr. Disraeli had little hope of realising his earlier visions, and he did not write Lothair to preach a political creed. The tale is that he avowed three motives, the first to occupy his mind on his fall from power, the second to make a large sum which he much needed, and the third to paint the manners of the highest order of rank and wealth, of which he alone amongst novelists had intimate knowledge. That is exactly what we see in Lothair. It is airy, fantastic, pure, graceful, and extravagant. The whole thing goes to bright music, like a comic opera of Gilbert and Sullivan. There is life and movement; but it is a scenic and burlesque life. There is wit, criticism, and caricature;, but it does not cut deep, and it is neither hot nor fierce. There is some pleasant tom-foolery; but at a comic opera we enjoy this graceful nonsense. We see in every page the trace of a powerful mind; but it is a mind laughing at its own creatures, at itself, at us. Lothair would be a work of art, if it were explicitly presented as a burlesque, such as was The Infernal Marriage, or if we did not know that it was written to pass the time by one who had ruled this great empire for years, and who within a few years more was destined to rule it again. It was a fanciful and almost sympathetic satire on the selfish fatuity of the noble, wealthy, and governing orders of British society. But then the author of this burlesque was himself about to ask these orders to admit him to their select ranks, and to enthrone him as their acknowledged chief.
As the rancour of party feeling that has gathered round the personality of Beaconsfield subsides, and as time brings new proofs of the sagacity of the judgments with which Benjamin Disraeli analysed the political traditions of British society, we may look for a fresh growth of the popularity of the trilogy and Lothair. England will one day be as just, as America has always been, to one of our wittiest writers. He will one day be formally admitted into the ranks of the Men of Letters. He has hitherto been kept outside, in a sense, partly by his being a prominent statesman and party chief, partly by his incurable tone of mind with its Semitic and non-English ways, partly by his strange incapacity to acquire the nuances of pure literary English. No English writer of such literary genius slips so often into vulgarisms, solecisms, archaisms, and mere slip-shod gossip. But these are after all quite minor defects. His books, even his worst books, abound in epigrams, pictures, characters, and scenes of rare wit. His painting of parliamentary life in England has neither equal nor rival. And his reflections on English society and politics reveal the insight of vast experience and profound genius.
V
W. M. THACKERAY
The literary career of William Makepeace Thackeray has not a few special features of its own that it is interesting to note at once. Of all the more eminent writers of the Victorian Age, his life was the shortest: he died in 1863 at the age of fifty-two, the age of Shakespeare. His literary career of twenty-six years was shorter than that of Carlyle, of Macaulay, Disraeli, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Froude, or Ruskin. It opened with the reign of the Queen, almost in the very year of Pickwick, whose author stood beside his grave and lived and wrote for some years more. But these twenty-six years of Thackeray's era of production were full of wonderful activity, and have left us as many volumes of rich and varied genius. And the most striking feature of all is this—that in these twenty-six full volumes in so many modes, prose, verse, romance, parody, burlesque, essay, biography, criticism, there are hardly more than one or two which can be put aside as worthless and as utter failures; very few fail in his consummate mastery of style; few can be said to be irksome to read, to re-read, and to linger over in the reading.