This is true of Disraeli. Long before he entered public life, before he knew the inimitable D’Orsay, or even the luminous Lyndhurst, before his most happy marriage, he had entered society at both doors—the gate of horn and the gate of ivory. As a stripling of twenty he had been sent, as we have seen, by Murray, the founder of his own fortune on Byron’s fortune and misfortunes, to Abbotsford and Sir Walter Scott. The young Disraeli used to dub Murray “the Emperor.” Murray described him as the most remarkable young man he had ever met; “a deep thinker but thoroughly practical in his ideas,” at once brilliant and solid, of a bright and airy disposition which endeared him to the young, and, himself unspoilt as “a child;” singularly happy in his home relations, and “his father is my oldest friend.” That father was himself a singular and remarkable man, who had attracted a distinguished coterie. He was Pye’s early intimate and Thomas Baring’s friend. His ties with Penn cemented his love of Buckinghamshire. He was familiar with Southey, and he knew Mrs. Siddons. He conversed with Samuel Rogers[144] and Tom Moore; he had corresponded and dined with Byron, of whom “Disraeli the Younger” has recorded some striking traits. He knew all the men of quills and letters, including the antiquarian Bliss and Douce, many of the wits, and some of the “wit-woulds.” His own brother-in-law, George Basevi, was an eminent architect,[145] and architecture is often touched in the son’s novels.[146] Another member of the family was a conveyancer, and through him the son was first sent to read law with a solicitor, in whose office he read Chaucer, and was then entered at Lincoln’s Inn. He had artistic acquaintances also. Barry, he knew well. Downman painted his wife, and Downman’s brother was his associate. And there were also some men of affairs who visited Isaac Disraeli’s house. The burrowing and irrepressible Croker, afterwards so mercilessly satirised as “Rigby,”[147] and equally trounced, poor man, by Thackeray and Macaulay, seems to have been his occasional purveyor of politics. But for contemporary parties he cared little. He was a solitary student of the past; excavating ancient manuscripts in the British Museum when the daily number of such scholars did not exceed six. He was shy, meditative, dreamy, and dispassionate. But he was poet besides recluse; his earliest courtship, while Dr. Johnson lay dying, had been that of the muse. Sir Walter Scott included one of his lyrics in a published collection.[148] He diversified his stern by lighter labours, and his novels, long since moldered, caused some stir and attracted sympathy. After the romance of his early failures and the surprise of his early success, he set himself patiently down to work for ten years before he would print another line. His own father, who never understood but always humored him, was a man of business, sanguine and prompt, yet gay and nonchalant, who lost fortunes and regained them.[149] Disraeli the Younger united the two strains of his father and of his grandfather. He was a practical dreamer.
Isaac Disraeli, then, gave his boy an opening to the literary world. Among his intimates was the shrewd solicitor, Mr. Austin, and his clever young wife, a literary coquette of talent, the aunt of the future Sir Henry Layard, the transcriber of Vivian Grey. Her salon was frequented, among others, by the Hooks[150] and the Mathews. With the Austins young Disraeli journeyed in Italy and Germany. From his father’s library he thus emerged on a larger world. But he soon outstepped its bounds. After his long Eastern travels with Clay, and Meredith[151] affianced to Disraeli’s sister—a voyage on which Byron’s Tita became Disraeli’s valet, and on which he encountered the most opposite types as well as some curious adventures[152]—his own first books made him the lion of several seasons. He and Bulwer divided the honors of Bath, then still fashionable. Lyndhurst grew to depend on his assistance, and even advice; Disraeli escorted him when as Chancellor he was present at Kensington at the accession of Queen Victoria; Lyndhurst’s daughter became an associate of Disraeli’s sister; and nothing gave Disraeli more unfeigned pleasure than the visits of Lyndhurst and Bulwer to his father at Bradenham.
He not only wrote novels, pamphlets, and sonnets (his vain ambition was to revolutionise poetry), but he seems to have contributed to the Edinburgh Review as well as to many magazines. In 1833, as has been noticed, he corresponded with its editor, Napier, with a view to a “slasher” on Morier’s “Zohrab,” which had been puffed in the Quarterly. Of the book he remarks, “A production in every respect more contemptible I have seldom met with;” and of the puff, “This is what comes of putting a tenth-rate novelist at the head of a great critical journal.”[153]
Then followed Gore House, with its high Bohemian wits, its low Bohemian buffoons, its loose celebrities, its “man of destiny,” Louis Napoleon; its laughter and its tears; its Watteau-like parterres, and the generous, erring Egeria of the grot.[154] Then, too, came that fascinating circle of the Sheridans, which united sparkling talent to entrancing beauty in extraordinary charm. But then also came the duller round of High Mayfair—the Londonderrys and the Buckinghams. Among diplomatists at this period he knew Pozzo. He had seen, or met, or known the fathers or grandfathers of most of the aristocracy which, forty years afterwards, he was to lead. Resolved from the first, as he said in an early letter, “to respect himself, the only way to make others respect you;” an outrageous dandy; sometimes in deplored debt, often in surmounted scrapes, always in good humour, he had surveyed the whole kaleidoscope of society, artificial as well as natural, before, or soon after, he turned thirty years of age; from the pachas and intriguers of the East, to the leaders and amusers of the West; from Ali and the governors, admirals, and garrisons of Malta and Gibraltar, to solemn busy-bodies in and out of place; the fops and flutterers in and out of society; men famous who were destined to obscurity, men obscure who were vowed to fame; eccentrics and platitudinarians; the Upper Ten—“the two thousand Brahmins who constitute the world”—and the lower ten thousand; from the eccentric Urquhart to “L. E. L.,” “the Sappho of Brompton,” and, it would seem, Davison the future musical critic. An early letter, probably addressed to him, lies before me. It may be of passing interest to subjoin it:—
“My dear Davison,
“I am very vexed that I missed you this morning. I arrived in town to-day, and am now living the vie solitaire in Bloomsbury. Will you come and ameliorate a bachelor’s torments by partaking of his goblet?
“I am alone, as Ossian says, but luckily not upon the hill of storms.
“Instead of that catch-cold situation, a good fireside will greet you.
“Mind you come.
“Yours ever,
“B. Disraeli.”“Excuse scrawl, etc. 6 o’clock.”
The society of those days still retained much of the Regency’s tinsel. It glittered far more than it shone. Society was not then quite the Dresden china shop with porcelain figures of beaux and boxers, of topers and bull-dogs, of satyrs and nymphs, of city swains and simpering shepherdesses, that it had been ten or fifteen years before. Byron, with his savage sincerity, may be said to have dashed that smooth farrago to fragments. But it remained a society of veneer and affectation. It was a less natural age than our own, with fewer ideals and less outward movement. It was a more boisterous age than our own; public opinion exercised far less pressure. It was at once a coarser, a more sentimental and a more romantic, if a more bombastic age than ours. There still lingered the curiosity of Dr. Johnson’s age for the tittle-tattle of voyagers and the curiosities of barbarism. But it was not in the main a more material age, or, under the surface, a much more selfish one. Sympathy was local then. “The people were only half born.” It was, however, certainly a generation far more fastidious and exclusive; and at the same time it was certainly more appreciative of genius. You could then appeal to the few where you cannot now appeal to the many; for the few then had neither the narrowness of the bourgeoisie nor the unlimited appetite of the million.
“The invention,” smiles Disraeli so early as in his mock-classical squib, The Infernal Marriage, “by Jupiter of an aristocratic immortality, as a reward for a well-spent life on earth, appears to me to have been a very ingenious idea. It really is a reward very stimulative of good conduct before we shuffle off this mortal coil, and remarkably contrasts with the democracy of the damned. The Elysians, with a splendid climate, a teeming soil, and a nation made on purpose to wait upon them, of course enjoyed themselves very much.... The Elysians, indeed, being highly refined and gifted ... were naturally a very liberal-minded race and very capable of appreciating every kind of excellence. If a gnome, or a sylph, therefore, in any way distinguished themselves, ... aye! indeed, if the poor devils could do nothing better than write a poem or a novel, they were sure to be noticed by the Elysians, who always bowed to them as they passed by, and sometimes, indeed, even admitted them into their circles.”
What Disraeli detested was what he termed, even in Vivian Grey, “society on anti-social principles.” What he liked was a distinct and distinctive circle, interchanging its ideas—“free trade in conversation.” In his social, as in his political outlook, he craved inclusiveness on the basis of excellence, and not either the restrictedness of a caste or the miscellany of a multitude. In this sense all society should be “aristocratic.” And he always felt that, as a rule, it was precisely the middle-class element, contrasted either with those who inherited the finer perceptions of breeding or with those—the gallery—born with perceptive instincts—that is in the main deficient in these respects. “... The stockbrokers’ ladies took off the quarto travels and the hot-pressed poetry. They were the patronesses of your patent ink and your wire-wove paper. That is all past....”[155] What he disrelished was the meaner sort of mediocrity, except when it was unassuming and useful.
“High breeding and a good heart,” he demands in Lothair for the “perfect host.” “To throw over a host,” he has also written, “is the most heinous of social crimes. It ought never to be pardoned....” “... She, too,” he says of the Duchess in Coningsby—who “was one of the delights of existence,”—“was distinguished by that perfect good breeding which is the result of nature and not of education; for it may be found in a cottage and may be missed in a palace. ’Tis a genial regard for the feelings of others that springs from the absence of selfishness.... Nothing in the world could have induced her to appear bored when another was addressing or attempting to amuse her. She was not one of those vulgar fine ladies who meet you one day with a vacant stare, as if unconscious of your existence, and address you on another in a tone of impertinent familiarity.” “This is a lesson for you fine ladies,” says “Egremont” in Sybil, “who think you can govern the world by what you call your social influences; asking people once or twice a year to an inconvenient crowd in your house; now haughtily smirking, and now impertinently staring at them, and flattering yourselves all this time that to have the occasional privilege of entering your saloons, and the periodical experience of your insolent recognition, is to be a reward for great exertions, or, if necessary, an inducement to infamous tergiversation.” And, indeed, the “Zenobia” of Endymion, who was Lady Jersey, did sometimes condescend to practise these shifts of political ambition.[156] But in high society with low standards, there were worse depths than the backstairs patronage of party recruits. “Never,” as the fine sentence prefixed to Sybil recalls, “were so many gentlemen, and so little gentleness.” The contemptuous materialism of “Monmouth House,” the elegant indifference of “Lord Eskdale,” around which revolve the satellites and parasites, social and political—the folks that made Selwyn exclaim when a great nobleman’s golden dinner-service was up to auction—“Lord, how many toads have eaten off this plate!”
“Among the habitual dwellers” (this from Coningsby) “in these delicate halls there was a tacit understanding, a prevalent doctrine, that required no formal exposition, no proofs and illustrations, no comment, and no gloss, which was, indeed, rather a traditional conviction than an impartial dogma—that the exoteric public were, on many subjects, the victims of very vulgar prejudice, which these enlightened personages wished neither to disturb nor to adopt.” “Society,” he said, alluding to its treatment of Byron in Venetia, “is all passions and no heart.” In Vivian Grey (as to the circumstances of which I shall say something in my last chapter) the father (that is, Disraeli’s father) thus admonishes the boyish son.