Excursions in Victorian Bibliography

by Michael Sadleir

BENJAMIN DISRAELI

It is easier to blame historians and political critics of the life and statesmanship of Disraeli for neglecting his novels, than it is oneself to judge these novels as literature, apart from the huge mass of incident, ambition, and achievement that went to make up the character of their extraordinary author. To attempt in a few pages an estimate of Disraeli as a man of letters were manifestly absurd, seeing that he was rarely that and nothing else. It were doubly absurd, even if possible, to treat in summary of the interactions of his political and literary genius when one of the finest biographies of modern times (and that in six volumes) has already covered every inch of the ground. The only purpose, therefore, which these unauthoritative notes may serve is that of indicating in a few words the development of Disraeli as a novelist and the respective content of his principal books.

Although his novels fall into distinct and different groups, they are all primarily satirical in character. From the moment of the anonymous but sensational appearance of Vivian Grey to that of the publication of Endymion which bore on each of its three volumes the name of the most distinguished statesman of the world, Disraeli held up alike to the follies and the ideals of his age the mirror of a keen and ruthless mind.

But if he gazed on his contemporaries more often from the angle of satire than from any other, he enclosed in their various frames the period portraits that are his books. As a very young man—unknown, ambitious, at once receptive and intensely sensitive—he used as material for fiction not only the incidents of his own life, but, even more, the thoughts and aspirations that filled his teeming brain. Vivian Grey (1826-7), Contarini Fleming (1833), and Alroy (1833) are mainly interesting as autobiography, and to the use of personal experience as material for novel-writing he returned in extreme old age when, looking back from the splendid eminence of his power, he described in the pages of Endymion the long road that he had travelled from obscurity to fame.

Vivian Grey appeared in five volumes, with an interval of a year between the issue of the first two and that of the last three. But for the brilliant publicity given to it by Colburn, the book would have attracted little or no attention. It is a showy, careless pastiche of the society of the day, a gallery of isolated portraits rather than a single composition, attractive to the fashionable public of the time for its thinly veiled presentment of well-known men and women. The reader is further unpleasantly aware that the author's interest in his book did not extend much beyond the first of the five volumes. Young men find it easier to start a book than to finish one, and Disraeli was clearly no exception to the rule.

Contarini Fleming and Alroy, written after an extended tour in the East, show, at its most luxuriant and ornate, the author's talent for heady, rhetorical prose. Like most of his race, Disraeli was more susceptible to magnificence and to decoration than to severe simplicity, and throughout his books was prone to an excessive use of epithet and metaphor. If these two early books show his love of ornament more shamelessly than those written at a maturer age, they can claim nevertheless to have received more careful and conscientious working, so that their embellishments, if too lavish, are at least scrupulously fashioned.

Between the publication of the last three volumes of Vivian Grey and that of the story of Contarini Fleming Disraeli published two works of fiction which, although in the matter of primary characteristic isolated from the rest of his work and from each other, contain elements that constantly reappear in the books of his later life.

The Voyage of Captain Popanilla (1828) is a satire on English political and social institutions cast in the form of an inverted Gulliver's Travels or Erewhon. Instead of an Englishman reaching an imaginary and fantastic land, where he finds conditions that correspond partly to the prejudices, partly to the ideals, of the author, the hero of Disraeli's satire is a being from a mythical world, who comes over the sea to an island that is, in all but name, England as Disraeli saw it. As an example of pertinacious and aggressive parody The Voyage of Captain Popanilla is witty and readable enough, but it fatigues, as do all pastiches of the kind, by its somewhat literal pursuit of contemporary activity. Disraeli should have limited his prospect of satire, for the individual beauties of any view are appreciated in proportion to the smallness of their number. Popanilla is overcrowded, and the reader's mind tires with the effort to solve the riddle that is contained in nearly every paragraph.

The Young Duke (1831) was written to make money. One may go farther and confess that the author, seeking frankly to profit by the contemporary popularity of the novel of fashionable life, wrote a tale of society into which he crammed all that he knew of character and incident likely to appeal to the mood of the moment. With such antecedents it is surprising that The Young Duke is not a worse book than it is. Inevitably it reads artificially, and the young writer had not the skill entirely to conceal the wilfulness with which the work was put together. On the other hand, the heroine deserves the attention of Disraeli students, for she is the direct forerunner of Sybil, and that part of The Young Duke which depends on her personality is not without a touch of the four great political novels upon which Disraeli's fame as a writer must rest.

It was four years after the publication of Alroy that Disraeli next appeared as a novelist. He then published, within six months of one another, two stories that stand markedly apart from the rest of his work, in that they are wholly without political significance. Even amid the extravagance of Contarini Fleming and The Young Duke occur passages that depend for their significance on political movements or political thought of the time. Vivian Grey, being a roman à clef of high society, and Popanilla being a direct satire of institutions, are naturally full of what was, even in those days, the author's ruling interest. But Henrietta Temple (1837) and Venetia (1837) are romances pure and simple. They may be said also to have no autobiographical significance, save in so far as the first part of the earlier book was written under the stimulus of a real love affair. It must be admitted that Henrietta Temple, once it gets beyond the boundary of Disraeli's own passionate experience, is a tame and careless book. The interval that passed between the writing of the earlier and that of the later portion seems to have extinguished his enthusiasm for the work. Colburn was clamouring for a novel, and Disraeli, as always hard pressed for money, raked out his incomplete manuscript, furbished it up, finished it off, and delivered it to the publisher. Venetia has not this fault of interrupted fashioning. It is, however, in one reader's opinion at any rate, a very tedious affair—rhetorical, unreal, and sluggish in movement; but this view is contrary to that held by many, who consider that the book's portraiture gives it value as commentary on the life of Byron and other famous people.