The Earl of Beaconsfield

by James Anthony Froude

The calm of satisfied ambition—A new novel—‘Lothair’—Survey of English society—The modern aristocracy—Forces working on the surface and below it—Worship of rank—Cardinal Grandison—Revolutionary socialism—Romeward drift of the higher classes—‘Lothair’ by far the most remarkable of all Disraeli’s writings.

‘LOTHAIR’

Once again in Opposition, Disraeli found leisure to return to his early occupations. As a politician, and at the head of a minority for the time hopelessly weak, he had merely to look on and assist, by opportune sarcasms, the ebb of Liberal popularity.

In this comparative calm he resumed his profession as a novelist, which he had laid aside for more than twenty years, and delivered himself of a work immeasurably superior to anything of the kind which he had hitherto produced. ‘Vivian Grey’ and ‘Contarini Fleming’ were portraits of himself, drawn at an age of vanity and self-consciousness. ‘Henrietta Temple’ and ‘Venetia’ were clever stories—written, probably, because he wanted money—but without the merit or the interest which would have given them a permanent place in English literature. The famous trilogy, ‘Coningsby,’ ‘Sybil,’ and ‘Tancred,’ though of far greater value, have the fatal defect, as works of art, that they were avowedly written for a purpose. ‘Lothair’ has none of these faults—Disraeli himself is imperceptible; the inner meaning of the book does not lie upon the surface. It was supposed, on its first appearance, to be a vulgar glorification of the splendours of the great English nobles into whose society he had been admitted as a parvenu, and whose condescension he rewarded by painting them in their indolent magnificence. The glitter and tinsel was ascribed to a Jewish taste for tawdry decoration, while he, individually, was thought to be glutted to satiation in the social Paradise, like ‘Ixion at the feasts of the gods.’ The divinities themselves were amused and forgiving. They did not resent—perhaps they secretly liked—the coloured photographs in which they saw themselves depicted. The life which Disraeli described was really their own, drawn naturally, without envy or malice; a life in which they enjoyed every pleasure which art could invent or fortune bestow, where they could discharge their duties to society by simply existing, and where they had the satisfaction of knowing that, by the mere gratification of their wishes, they were providing employment for multitudes of dependents. They had cultivated the graces of perfected humanity in these splendid surroundings, and ‘Lothair’ was accepted as a voluntary offering of not undeserved homage.

In all Disraeli’s writings, from his earliest age, there is traceable a conviction that no country could prosper under a free Constitution, without an aristocracy with great duties and great privileges; an aristocracy who, as leaders of the people, should be their examples also of manliness and nobility of character. He had observed how, as political power had passed away from the English peers, while their wealth remained, and increased, their habits had become more self-indulgent—they had become a superior but socially exclusive caste. They were still an estate of the realm, but they had become, like the gods of Epicurus, lifted above the toils and troubles of this mortal world, still feeding on the offerings which continued to smoke upon the altars, but of no definite use, and likely, it might be, to lose their celestial thrones, should mankind cease to believe in them. The occupation of the Elysians in the ‘Infernal Marriage’ was to go to operas and plays and balls, to wander in the green shades of the forest, to canter in light-hearted cavalcades over breezy downs, to banquet with the beautiful and the witty, to send care to the devil, and indulge the whim of the moment. It was easy to see who were meant by the Elysians. Privileged mortals they might be, but mortals out of whom, unless they roused themselves, no future rulers would ever rise to govern again the English nation. The Emperor Julian imagined that he could galvanise the dead gods of Paganism; Disraeli, believing that an aristocracy of some kind was a political necessity, had dreamt of an awakening of the young generation of English nobles to the heroic virtues of the age of the Plantagenets.

A quarter of a century had gone by since he had sent Tancred for inspiration to Mount Sinai. During all that time he had lived himself within the privileged circle. He had not over-estimated the high native qualities of the patrician lords and dames, but he had recognised the futility of his imaginations. They were as little capable of change as Venus and Apollo, and in his enforced leisure he drew their likenesses, with a light satire—so light that they failed to perceive it. The students of English history in time to come, who would know what the nobles of England were like in the days of Queen Victoria, will read ‘Lothair’ with the same interest with which they read ‘Horace’ and ‘Juvenal.’ When Disraeli wrote, they were in the zenith of their magnificence. The industrial energy of the age had doubled their already princely revenues without effort of their own. They were the objects of universal homage—partly a vulgar adulation of rank, partly the traditionary reverence for their order, which had not yet begun to wane. Though idleness and flattery had done their work to spoil them, they retained much of the characteristics of a high-born race. Even Carlyle thought that they were the best surviving specimens of the ancient English. But their self-indulgence had expanded with their incomes. Compared with the manners of the modern palace or castle, the habits of their grandfathers and grandmothers had been frugality and simplicity: and they had no duties—or none which they had been taught to understand. So they stand before us in ‘Lothair.’ Those whom Elysian pleasures could not satisfy were weary of the rolling hours, and for want of occupation are seen drifting among the seductions of the Roman harlot; while from below the surface is heard the deep ground-tone of the European revolution, which may sweep them all away. We have no longer the bombast and unreality of the revolutionary epic. Disraeli has still the same subject before him, but he treats it with the mellow calmness of matured experience. He writes as a man of the world, with perfect mastery of his material, without a taint of ill-nature—with a frank perception of the many and great excellences of the patrician families, of the charm and spirit of the high-born matrons and girls, of the noble capabilities of their fathers and brothers, paralysed by the enchantment which condemns them to uselessness. They stand on the canvas like the heroes and heroines of Vandyck; yet the sense never leaves us that they are but flowers of the hothouse, artificially forced into splendour, with no root in outer nature, and therefore of no continuance.

The period of the story was the immediate year in which Disraeli was writing. The characters, though in but few instances portraits of living men and women, were exactly, even ludicrously, true to the prevailing type. We are introduced on the first page into a dukery the grandest of its kind; the owner of it, the duke, being too great to require a name, while minor dukes move like secondary planets in the surrounding ether.

The duke has but one sorrow—that he has no home, his many palaces requiring a periodic residence at each. He is consoled each morning in his dressing-room, when he reviews his faultless person, by the reflection that his family were worthy of him. The hero is an ingenuous, pure-minded youth, still under age, though fast approaching his majority, the heir of enormous possessions, which, great as they descended from his father, have been increased to fabulous proportions by the progress of the country. His expectations rather oppress than give him pleasure, for he is full of generous aspirations, to which he knows not how to give effect. He feels only that his wealth will give him boundless powers for good or evil, and all that his natural piety and simplicity can tell him is that he ought to do something good with it. In an ordinary novel, a youth so furnished would be the natural prey of scheming mothers. Disraeli makes him the intended victim of a far more subtle conspiracy. His rank is vaguely indicated as only second to that of the duke himself. An absurd and unnatural consequence attaches to him in society, and he is marked as a prey by the power which aims at recovering England to the Church of Rome by the conversion of lords and ladies. He is exposed to temptation through the innocence of his nature. Of his guardians, one is a Scotch Presbyterian earl, narrow, rugged, and honest; the other, a distinguished clergyman of the Anglican Church, an early friend of his father, who has ‘gone over’ to Rome, risen to high rank, and is at the head of the English Mission. The personality of this eminent man is visibly composed of the late Cardinal Wiseman and his successor, who is still present among us, and is so favourably known by his exertions for the improvement of the people. The function of Cardinal Grandison, as Disraeli represents him, is the propagation of Catholic truth among patrician circles. He has operated successfully on young and beautiful countesses, who, in turn, have worked upon their husbands.

The first converts of the apostles were the poor and the unknown. The Cardinal’s superficial, but not altogether groundless, calculation, was that if he could convert earls and countesses, the social influence of those great persons would carry the nation after them. Lothair, with his enormous fortune, would be a precious acquisition. His boyhood had been spent in Scotland, and, through his guardians’ precautions, the Cardinal has no opportunities of influencing him—indeed, had scarcely seen him. They meet when he enters the world. Their connection places them on terms of immediate intimacy, and the web is spun round the fly with exquisite skill. Lothair is naturally religious, and no direct attempts are made upon his faith. Theological differences are treated with offhand ease; but he finds himself imperceptibly drawn into Catholic society. Accomplished Monsignori are ever at his side. Great ladies treat him with affectionate confidence, and he is delighted with an element where the highest breeding is sanctified by Spiritual devotion. More delicate attractions are brought to bear—a lovely girl, so angelic that she is intended for a convent, lets him see that her destiny may, perhaps, be changed if she can find a husband with a spirit like her own. Lothair sinks rapidly under the combination of enchantments. An immense balance lies at his bankers, the accumulations of his minority. His conversations with Miss Arundel convince him that he must build a cathedral in London with it. It never occurred to him—nobody had even suggested to him—that his rent-roll entailed responsibilities towards the thousands of working families who were his own dependents, and by whose toil that wealth had been created. To build a cathedral, at any rate, would be a precious achievement—whether Catholic or Protestant might be decided when it was completed. He was, himself, the only person who seemed ignorant which it was to be.

The spell which was cast by a lady, could be broken only by another lady’s hand. Before Lothair is finally subdued, accident brings him in contact with Theodora, the wife of a rich American, dazzlingly beautiful, the incarnation of the Genius of the European revolution, to which her devotion is as intense as that of Miss Arundel to the Catholic Church. Two emotional impulses divide at present the minds of the passionate and the restless. The timid see salvation only in the reunion of Christendom and the returning protection of the Virgin. The bold and generous, weary of the cants, the conventionalisms, and unrealities of modern life, fling themselves into the revolutionary torrent, which threatens the foundations of existing civilisation.