This judicious observation, translated into the language of art, gives Disraeli's secret. His 'nobs' are so splendid in their surroundings, such a magical light of wealth, magnificence, and rhetoric is thrown upon all their doings, that we are cheated into sympathy. Who can be hard upon a young man whose behaviour to his creditors may be questionable, but who is swept away in such a torrent of gorgeous hues? The first sight of Miss Temple is enough to reveal her dazzling complexion, her violet-tinted eyes, her lofty and pellucid brow, her dark and lustrous locks. Love for such a being is the 'transcendent and surpassing offspring of sheer and unpolluted sympathy.' It is a rapture and a madness; it is to the feelings of the ordinary mortal what sunlight is to moonlight, or wine to water. What wonder that Armine, 'pale and trembling, withdrew a few paces from the overwhelming spectacle, and leant against a tree in a chaos of emotion? A delicious and maddening impulse thrilled his frame; a storm raged in his soul; a big drop quivered on his brow; and a slight foam played upon his lip.' But 'the tumult of his mind gradually subsided; the fleeting memories, the saddening thoughts, that for a moment had coursed about in such wild order, vanished and melted away, and a feeling of bright serenity succeeded—a sense of beauty and joy, and of hovering and circumambient happiness.' In short, he asked the lady in to lunch. That is the love which can only be produced in palaces. Your Burns may display some warmth of feeling about a peasant-girl, and Wordsworth cherish the domestic affections in a cottage; but for the dazzling, brilliant forms of passion we must enter the world of magic, where diamonds are as plentiful as blackberries, and all surrounding objects are turned to gold by the alchemy of an excited imagination. The only difference is that, while other men assume that the commonest things will take a splendid colour as seen through a lover's eyes, Disraeli takes care that whatever his lovers see shall have a splendid colouring.
Once more, if we consent for the time to take our author's view—and that is the necessary condition for enjoying most literature—we must admit the vivacity and, at times, the real eloquence of Disraeli's rhetoric. In 'Contarini Fleming' he takes a still more ambitious flight, and with considerable success. Fleming, the embodiment of the poetic character, is, we might almost say, to other poets what Armine is to other lovers. He has the same love of brilliant effects, and the same absence of genuine tenderness. But one other qualification must be made. We feel some doubts as to his being a poet at all. He has indeed that amazing vitality with which Disraeli endows all his favourite heroes, and in which we may recognise the effervescence of youthful genius. But his genius is so versatile that we doubt its true destination. His first literary performance is to write a version of 'Vivian Grey,' a reckless and successful satire; his most remarkable escapade is to put himself at the head of a band of students, apparently inspired by Schiller's Robbers to emulate the career of Moor; his greatest feat is a sudden stroke of diplomacy which enables him to defeat the plans of more veteran statesmen. And when he has gone through his initiation, wooed and won his marvellous beauty, and lost her in an ideal island, the final shape of his aspirations is curiously characteristic. Having become rich quite unexpectedly—for he did not know that he was to be the hero of one of Disraeli's novels—he resolved to 'create a paradise.' He bought a Palladian pile, with a large estate and beautiful gardens. In this beautiful scene he intends to erect a Saracenic palace full of the finest works of modern and ancient art; and in time he hopes to 'create a scene which may rival in beauty and variety, though not in extent, the villa of Hadrian, whom I have always considered the most accomplished and sumptuous character of antiquity.' He has already laid the foundation of a tower which is to rise to a height of at least a hundred and fifty feet, and is to equal in solidity and design the most celebrated works of antiquity. Certainly the scheme is magnificent; but it is scarcely the ambition which one might have expected from a poet. Rather it is the design of a man endowed with a genuine artistic temperament, but with a strange desire to leave some showy and tangible memorial of his labours. His ambition is not to stir men's souls with profound thought, or to soften by some new harmonies the weary complaints of suffering humanity, but to startle the world by the splendid embodiment in solid marble of the most sumptuous dreams of a cultivated imagination. Contarini Fleming, indeed, as he shows by a series of brilliant travellers' sketches, is no mean master of what may be called poetical prose. His pictures of life and scenery are vivacious, rapid, and decisive. In later years, the habit of parliamentary oratory seems to have injured Disraeli's style. In 'Lothair' there is a good deal of slipshod verbiage. But in these earlier stories the style is generally excellent till it becomes too ambitious. It has a kind of metallic glitter, brilliant, sparkling with numerous flashes of wit and fancy, and never wanting in sharpness of effect, though it may be deficient in delicacy. Yet the author, who is of necessity to be partly identified with the hero of 'Contarini Fleming,' is distinctly not a poet; and the incapacity is most evident when he endeavours to pass the inexorable limits. The distinction between poetry and rhetoric is as profound as it is undefinable. A true poet, as possessing an exquisite sensibility to the capacities of his instrument, does not try to get the effects of metre when he is writing without its restrictions and its advantages. Disraeli shows occasionally a want of this delicacy of perception by breaking into a kind of compromise between the two which can only be called Ossianesque. The effect, for example, of such a passage as the following is, to my taste at least, simply grotesque:—
'Still the courser onward rushes; still his mighty heart supports him. Season and space, the glowing soil, the burning ray, yield to the tempest of his frame, the thunder of his nerves, and lightning of his veins.
'Food or water they have none. No genial fount, no graceful tree, rise with their pleasant company. Never a beast or bird is there, in that hoary desert bare. Nothing breaks the almighty stillness. Even the jackal's felon cry might seem a soothing melody. A grey wild cat, with snowy whiskers, out of a withered bramble stealing, with a youthful snake in its ivory teeth, in the moonlight gleams with glee. This is their sole society.'
And so on. Some great writers have made prose as melodious as verse; and Disraeli can at times follow their example successfully. But one likes to know what one is reading; and the effect of this queer expression is as if, in the centre of a solemn march, were incorporated a few dancing-steps, à propos to nothing, and then subsiding into a regular pace. Milton wrote grand prose and grand verse; but you are never uncertain whether a fragment of 'Paradise Lost' may or may not have been inserted by mere accident in the 'Areopagitica.'
Not to dwell upon such minor defects, nobody can read 'Contarini Fleming' or 'Henrietta Temple' without recognising the admirable talent and exuberant vitality of the author. They have the faults of juvenile performances; they are too gaudy; the author has been tempted to turn aside too frequently in search of some brilliant epigram; he has mistaken bombast for eloquence, and mere flowery brilliance for warmth of emotion. But we might hope that longer experience and more earnest purpose might correct such defects. Alas! in the year of their publication, Disraeli first entered Parliament. His next works comprised the trilogy, where the artistic aim has become subordinate to the political or biological; and some thirty years of parliamentary labours led to 'Lothair,' of which it is easiest to assume that it is a practical joke on a large scale, or a prolonged burlesque upon Disraeli's own youthful performances. May one not lament the degradation of a promising novelist into a Prime Minister?
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Perhaps I ought to substitute 'Lord Beaconsfield' for Disraeli; but I am writing of the author of 'Coningsby,' rather than of the author of 'Endymion:' and I will therefore venture to preserve the older name.
[5] 'He never loved that loved not at first sight,' says Marlowe, and Shakespeare after him. I cannot say whether this be an undesigned literary coincidence or an appropriation. Disraeli, we know, was skilful in the art of annexation. One or two instances may be added. Here is a clear case of borrowing. Fuller says in the character of the good sea-captain in the 'Holy State'—'Who first taught the water to imitate the creatures on land, so that the sea is the stable of horse-fishes, the stye of hog-fishes, the kennel of dog-fishes, and in all things, the sea is the ape of the land?' Essper George, in 'Vivian Grey,' says to the sea: 'O thou indifferent ape of earth, what art thou, O bully ocean, but the stable of horse-fishes, the stall of cow-fishes, the stye of hog-fishes, and the kennel of dog-fishes?' Other cases may be more doubtful. On one occasion, Disraeli spoke of the policy of his opponents as a combination of 'blundering and plundering.' The jingle was thought to be adapted from a previous epigram about 'meddling and muddling;' but here is the identical phrase: Coleridge wrote in the 'Courier:' 'The writer, whilst abroad, was once present when most bitter complaints were made of the —— government. "Government!" exclaimed a testy old captain of a Mediterranean trading-vessel, "call it blunderment or plunderment or what you like—only not a government!"'—Coleridge's 'Essays on his own Times,' p. 893. Disraeli is sometimes credited with the epigram in 'Lothair' about critics being authors who have failed. I know not who said this first; but it was certainly not Disraeli. Landor makes Porson tell Southey: 'Those who have failed as writers turn reviewers.' The classical passage is in Sainte-Beuve. Balzac, he says, said somewhere of a sculptor who had become discouraged: 'Redevenu artiste in partibus, il avait beaucoup de succès dans les salons, il était consulté par beaucoup d'amateurs; il passa critique comme tous les impuissants qui mentent à leurs débuts.' Sainte-Beuve, naturally indignant at a phrase aimed against his craft, if not against himself, says that this may be true of a sculptor or painter who deserts his art in order to talk; 'mais, dans l'ordre de la pensée, cette parole de M. de Balzac qui revient souvent sous la plume de toute une école de jeunes littérateurs, est à la fois (je leur en demande pardon) une injustice et une erreur.'—'Causeries du Lundi,' vol. ii. p. 455. A very similar phrase is to be found in a book where one would hardly look for such epigrams, Marryat's 'King's Own.' But to trace such witticisms to their first source is a task for 'Notes and Queries.'