The Earl of Beaconsfield

by James Anthony Froude

‘The Bar!—pooh! Law and bad jokes till we are forty, and then with the most brilliant success the prospect of gout and a coronet. Besides, to succeed as an advocate I must be a great lawyer, and to be a great lawyer I must give up my chances of being a great man. The “services” in war time are fit only for desperadoes (and that truly am I), and in peace are fit only for fools. The Church is more rational. I should certainly like to act Wolsey, but the thousand and one chances are against me, and my destiny should not be a chance.’ Practical always Disraeli was, bent simply on making his way, and his way to a great position. No ignes fatui were likely to mislead him into spiritual morasses, no love-sick dreams to send him wandering after imaginary Paradises. He was as shrewd as he was ambitious, and he took an early measure of his special capabilities. ‘Beware,’ his father had said to him, ‘of trying to be a great man in a hurry.’ His weakness was impatience. He could not bear to wait. Byron had blazed like a new star at five-and-twenty; why not he? Pitt had been Prime Minister at a still earlier age, and of all young Disraeli’s studies political history had been the most interesting to him. But to rise in politics he must get into Parliament, and the aristocrats who condescended to dine in Bloomsbury Square, and to laugh at his impertinence, were not likely to promise him a pocket borough. His father could not afford to buy him one, nor would have consented to squander money on so wild a prospect. He saw that to advance he must depend upon himself and must make his way into some financially independent position. While chafing at the necessity he rationally folded his wings, and on November 18, 1821, when just seventeen, he was introduced into a solicitor’s office in Old Jewry. Mr. Maples, a member of the firm, was an old friend of Isaac Disraeli, and to Mr. Maples’s department ‘Ben’ was attached. Distasteful as the occupation must have been to him, he attached himself zealously to his work. He remained at his desk for three years, and Mr. Maples described him as ‘most assiduous in his attention to business, as showing great ability in the transaction of it,’ and as likely, if allowed to go to the Bar, to attain to eminence there.

‘VIVIAN GREY’

If the project had been carried out the anticipation would probably have been verified. The qualities which enabled Disraeli to rise in the House of Commons would have lifted him as surely, and perhaps as rapidly, into the high places of the profession. He might have entered Parliament with greater facility and with firmer ground under his feet. He acquiesced in his father’s wishes; he was entered at Lincoln’s Inn, and apparently intended to pursue a legal career; but the Fates or his own adventurousness ordered his fortunes otherwise. His work in the office had not interfered with his social engagements. He met distinguished people at his father’s table—Wilson Croker, then Secretary to the Admiralty; Samuel Rogers; John Murray, the proprietor of the ‘Quarterly Review,’ and others of Murray’s brilliant contributors. The Catholic question was stirring. There were rumours of Reform, and the political atmosphere was growing hot. Disraeli observed, listened, took the measure of these men, and thought he was as good as any of them. He began to write in the newspapers. The experienced Mr. Murray took notice of him as a person of whom something considerable might be made. These acquaintances enabled him to extend his knowledge of the world, which began to shape itself into form and figure. To understand the serious side of things requires a matured faculty. The ridiculous is caught more easily. With Mrs. Austen for an adviser, and perhaps with her assistance, he composed a book which, however absurd in its plot and glaring in its affectation, revealed at once that a new writer had started into being, who would make his mark on men and things. That a solicitor’s clerk of twenty should be able to produce ‘Vivian Grey’ is not, perhaps, more astonishing than that Dickens, at little more than the same age, should have written ‘Pickwick.’ All depends on the eye. Most of us encounter every day materials for a comedy if we could only see them. But genius is wanted for it, and the thing, when accomplished, proves that genius has been at work.

The motto of Vivian Grey was sufficiently impudent:

Why, then, the world’s mine oyster,

Which with my sword I’ll open.

The central figure is the author himself caricaturing his own impertinence and bringing on his head deserved retribution; but the sarcasm, the strength of hand, the audacious personalities caught the attention of the public, and gave him at once the notoriety which he desired. ‘Vivian’ was the book of the season; everyone read it, everyone talked about it, and keys were published of the characters who were satirised. Disraeli, like Byron, went to sleep a nameless youth of twenty-one and woke to find himself famous.

A successful novel may be gratifying to vanity, but it is a bad introduction to a learned profession. Attorneys prefer barristers who stick to business and do not expatiate into literature. A single fault might be overlooked, and ‘Vivian Grey’ be forgotten before its author could put on his wig, but a more serious cause interrupted his legal progress. He was overtaken by a singular disorder, which disabled him from serious work. He had fits of giddiness, which he described as like a consciousness of the earth’s rotation. Once he fell into a trance, from which he did not completely recover for a week. He was recommended to travel, and the Austens took him abroad with them for a summer tour. They went to Paris, to Switzerland, to Milan, Venice, Florence, Geneva, and back over Mont Cenis into France. His health became better, but was not re-established, and he returned to his family still an invalid.

BRADENHAM

The ‘law’ was postponed, but not yet abandoned. In a letter to his father, written in 1832, he spoke of his illness as having robbed him of five years of life; as if this, and this alone, had prevented him from going on with his profession. Meanwhile there was a complete change in the outward circumstances of the Disraeli household. Isaac Disraeli, who had the confirmed habits of a Londoner, whose days had been spent in libraries and his evenings in literary society, for some reason or other chose to alter the entire character of his existence. Like Ferrars in ‘Endymion,’ though not for the same cause, he tore himself away from all his associations and withdrew with his wife and children to an old manor house in Buckinghamshire, two miles from High Wycombe. Bradenham, their new home, is exactly described in the account which Disraeli gives of the Ferrars’s place of retirement; and perhaps their first arrival there and their gipsy-like encampment in the old hall, the sense, half-realised, that they were being taken away from all their interests and associations, may equally have been drawn from memory. The Disraelis, however, contrived happily enough to fit themselves to their new existence. Disraeli all through his life delighted in the country and country scenes. The dilapidated manor house was large and picturesque. The land round it was open down, or covered thinly with scrub and woods. They had horses and could gallop where they pleased. They had their dogs and their farmyard; they made new friends among the tenantry and the labourers. Disraeli’s head continued to trouble him, but the air and the hills gave him his best chance of recovery. His father, contented with an occasional lecture, left him to himself. He was devoted to his mother and passionately attached to his sister. Altogether nothing could be calmer, nothing more affectionately peaceful than the two or three years which he passed at Bradenham after this migration. Though he could not study in London chambers, he could read and he could write, and over his writing he worked indefatigably, if not with great success. He added a second part to ‘Vivian Grey.’ Clever it could not help being, but it had not the flavour of the first. He wrote the ‘Young Duke,’ a flashy picture of high society which might have passed muster as the ephemeral production of an ordinary novelist. Neither of these, however, indicated any literary advance, nor did he himself attach any value to them. In a happier interval, perhaps, when he had a respite from his headaches, he threw off three light satires, which, with one exception, are the most brilliant of all his productions. ‘Ixion in Heaven’ is taken from the story of the King of Thessaly who was carried to Olympus and fell in love with the queen of the gods. Disraeli’s classical knowledge probably went no farther than Lemprière’s Dictionary, but Lemprière gave him all that he wanted. The form and tone are like Lucian’s, and the execution almost as good. No characters in real life are more vivid than those which he draws of the high-bred divinities at the court of the Father of the gods, while the Father himself is George IV. Apollo Byron, and the ladies well-known ornaments of the circles of the Olympians of May Fair.