“... You are now inspecting one of the worst portions of society in what is called the great world (St. Giles’ is bad, but of another kind), and it may be useful, on the principle that the actual sight of brutal ebriety was supposed to have inspired youth with the virtue of temperance.... Let me warn you not to fall into the usual error of youth, in fancying that the circle you move in is precisely the world itself. Do not imagine that there are not other beings, whose benevolent principle is governed by finer sympathies, and by those nobler emotions which really constitute all our public and private virtues. I give you this hint, lest, in your present society, you might suppose these virtues were merely historical.” Speaking of “Vivian Grey” under the guise of “Contarini Fleming’s” first novel, Disraeli makes his hero ejaculate: “All the bitterness of my heart, occasioned by my wretched existence among their false circles, found its full vent. Never was anything so imprudent. Everybody figured, and all parties and opinions alike suffered.” Still more did he despise “the insolence of the insignificant.”
What he admired in whatever form—even when incompatible with society—was purpose with personality. This is manifest in all his early novels, conspicuous in his later ones. The two heroes of Venetia—Byron and Shelley[157]—are portrayed from this point of view. Even the hysterical purpose of Lady Caroline Lamb in the person of “Lady Monteagle” is recognised; and of Byron he causes his characters to speak in Vivian Grey: “There was the man! And that such a man should be lost to us at the very moment that he had begun to discover why it had pleased the Omnipotent to have endowed him with such powers!”—“If one thing were more characteristic of Byron’s mind than another, it was his strong, shrewd common sense, his pure, unadulterated sagacity.”—“The loss of Byron can never be retrieved. He was indeed a real man; and, when I say this, I award him the most splendid character which human nature need aspire to.”[158] The very intellectual purpose of comparative purposelessness, of dilettante taste, attracted him. This is how he addresses “Luttrell” in The Young Duke: “... Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, and that splendour is not heart. Teach us that taste is a talisman which can do greater wonders than the millions of the loan-monger. Teach us that to vie is not to rival; and to imitate not to invent. Teach us that pretension is a bore. Teach us that wit is excessively good-natured, and, like champagne, not only sparkles, but is sweet.[159] Teach us the vulgarity of malignity. Teach us that envy spoils our complexions, and that anxiety destroys our figure. Catch the fleeting colours of that sly chameleon, Cant, and show what excessive trouble we are ever taking to make ourselves miserable and silly. Teach us all this, and Aglaia shall stop a crow in its course, and present you with a pen, Thalia hold the golden fluid in a Sévres vase, and Euphrosyne support the violet-coloured scroll.”
So, too, the energetic personality of D’Orsay aroused his enthusiastic friendship, and drew from him, some twenty years after that ambrosial figure had vanished, the tribute of “... the most accomplished and the most engaging character that has figured in this century, who, with the form and universal genius of an Alcibiades, combined a brilliant wit and a heart of quick affection, and who, placed in a public position, would have displayed a courage, a judgment, and a commanding intelligence which would have ranked him among the leaders of mankind.” D’Orsay speaks and acts to the life as “Count Mirabel” in The Young Duke. And, in a too unfamiliar passage of The Young Duke, he thus also embalms, I fancy,[160] the memory of Lady Blessington’s maligned charm under the veil of “Lady Aphrodite.”
“... We are not of those who set themselves against the verdict of society, or ever omit to expedite, by a gentle kick, a falling friend. And yet, when we just remember beauty is beauty, and grace is grace, and kindness is kindness, although the beautiful, the graceful, and the amiable do get in a scrape, we don’t know how it is, we confess it is a weakness, but, under these circumstances, we do not feel quite inclined to sneer. But this is wrong. We should not pity or pardon those who have yielded to great temptation, or, perchance, great provocation. Besides, it is right that our sympathies should be kept for the injured.” Endeavour and individuality he reverenced and recognised. Tact, the charity of manners, he admired.[161] But for aimlessness, whether callous or random, whether patrician or plebeian—whether of “Lord Marney,” who said to “Egremont,” “I am your elder brother, sir, whose relationship to you is your only claim to the consideration of society,” and was answered, “A curse on the society that has fashioned such claims ... founded on selfishness, cruelty, and fraud, and leading to demoralisation, misery, and crime;” or of “Rigby,” who called his record in Debrett of the marriage successfully schemed for his patron, “a great fact.” To such as these he gave no quarter; and he scalped them with a wit and an irony that has rarely been equalled.
And he loved startling contrasts. “Whatever they did,” he says in The Infernal Marriage, “the Elysians were careful never to be vehement.” Disraeli liked to break the monotone of society’s polished surface by pronounced and original types of race, of class, of passion, of enterprise; the Roman among the European-Americans, the Arabian, the Syrian, the Greek, the Gaul among the Franks. He revelled in romantic women, muses, or prophetesses, who lead forlorn movements, or rally broken fortunes; in men whom they cheer and kindle; in public spirits; in sudden and unexpected revolutions of fortune, and sudden and unforeseen revelations of character. To himself in his first youth might adhere the phrase with which he then labelled “Popanilla:” “He looked the most dandified of savages, and the most savage of dandies.” He liked to pit the Bohemian against the noble, and the valet against the hero; the “light children of dance and song” against their heavy patrons; to display the power of career even in the lodginghouse-keeper’s daughter; to depict the aristocracy of the master working man; to analyse and contrast the ironies of the struggle, the social tragedy of illusion, and the social farce of fashion. “... ‘Your mind is opening, Ixion,’” says Mercury, in that brilliant skit which Disraeli penned before he was celebrated; “‘you will soon be a man of the world. To the left, and keep clear of that star’—‘Who lives there?’—‘The Fates know, not I. Some low people who are trying to shine into notice. ’Tis a parvenu planet, and only sprung up into space within this century. We don’t visit them.’” “Sybil” herself, it should be remembered, is an aristocrat born, but not bred, while half “Egremont’s” Norman relations are cads or snobs.
He loved, too, society’s foibles—to hit off the precocious wiseacres of the golden youth. “... A young fellow of two- or three-and-twenty knows the world as men used to do after as many years of scrapes. I wonder whether there is such a thing as a greenhorn? Effie Crabbs says the reason he gives up his house is that he has cleaned out the old generation, and that the new generation would clean him.”[162] To banter “those uncommonly able men who only want an opportunity,” the philosophers and the puppies; to jest, as he does in Popanilla, at legal fictions; to poke fun at the “great orator, before a green table, beating a red box,” or the prattlers on science in “gilded saloons;” to depict the pyramidal selfishness but unruffled pride of Lord Hertford in “Lord Monmouth”—Thackeray’s “Lord Steyne;” to chronicle the pæan of “Mrs. Guy Flouncey”—a precursor of “Becky Sharp”—when she wins the invitation to the great house: “My dear, we have done it at last!” or those whose summum bonum is to have ten thousand a year and be thought to have five; or those waiters on dying Mammon, who, when the will is read, “all become orderly and broken-hearted;” or the bored good humour of the Radical noble, who was almost a Communist except as regarded land—“as if a fellow could have too much land;” to burlesque the whole medley of blue bores and bore-blues, of red-tape, and peas-on-drums, the Jacks-in-office and the Jacks-in-boxes, of “nobs and snobs,” of “statesmen, fiddlers, and buffoons.” But it should not be forgotten that he ever kept a warm place in his heart for sailors, whom he regarded as among the most natural and delightful of mankind.[163]
It was not only the big shams and little follies of society that revolted or amused him. He held, also, that melancholy and dulness were social crimes. “If a man be gloomy, let him keep to himself. No man has a right to go croaking about society, or, what is worse, looking as if he stifled grief. These fellows should be put in the pound. We like a good broken heart or so now and then; but then one should retire to the Sierra Morena mountains and live upon locusts and wild honey, not dine out with our cracked cores....”[164] And among breaches of social tact, he most disliked those minor monomanias which make the bore. “Never,” he once warned a young man, “discuss ‘The Letters of Junius,’ or ‘The Man in the Iron Mask.’” Some of his happiest conversations are to be found in the Lothair colloquies at Muriel Towers.
Society used to depend on conversation much more than it does now, when there is so much hurry, so much wealth, so many amusements, so little privacy, and so much printed about it that practically there is no compact society at all—merely a touring menagerie. Disraeli, in one of his earlier novels,[165] has an excellent essay in miniature on social conversation:—
“The high style of conversation where eloquence and philosophy emulate each other, ... all this has ceased. It ceased in this country with Johnson and Burke, and it requires a Johnson and a Burke for its maintenance. There is no mediocrity in such intercourse, no intermediate character between the sage and the bore. The second style, where men, not things, are the staple, but where wit and refinement and sensibility invest even personal details with intellectual interest, does flourish at present, as it always must in a highly civilised society.... Then comes your conversation man, who, we confess, is our aversion. His talk is a thing apart, got up before he enters the company from whose conduct it should grow out. He sits in the middle of a large table, and, with a brazen voice, bawls out his anecdotes about Sir Thomas or Sir Humphry, Lord Blank or Lady Blue. He is incessant, yet not interesting; ever varying, yet always monotonous. Even if we are amused, we are no more grateful for the entertainment than we are to the lamp over the table for the light which it universally sheds, and to yield which it was obtained on purpose. We are more gratified by the slight conversation of one who is often silent, but who speaks from his momentary feelings, than by all this hullabaloo. Yet this machine is generally a favourite piece of furniture with the hostess. You may catch her eye, as he recounts some adventure of the morning, which proves that he not only belongs to every club, but goes to them, light up with approbation; and then when the ladies withdraw, and the female senate deliver their criticism on the late actors, she will observe with a gratified smile to her confidante, that the dinner went off well, and that Mr. Bellow was very strong to-day. All this is horrid, and the whole affair is a delusion. A variety of people are brought together, who all come as late as possible, and retire as soon, merely to show that they have other engagements. A dinner is prepared for them, which is hurried over, in order that a certain number of dishes should be—not tasted, but seen. And provided that there is no moment that an absolute silence reigns; that, besides the bustling of the servants, the clattering of the plates and knives, a stray anecdote is told, which, if good, has been heard before, and which, if new, is generally flat; provided a certain number of certain names of people of consideration are introduced, by which some stranger, for whom the party is often secretly given, may learn the scale of civilisation of which he this moment forms a part; provided the senators do not steal out too soon to the House, and their wives to another party—the hostess is congratulated on the success of her entertainment.” He much preferred the conversation of “Pinto,” whose raillery, unremembered, amused and “flattered the self-love of those whom it seemed sportively not to spare.... He was not an intellectual Crœsus, but his pockets were full of sixpences.” But then, “Pinto” did not quite belong to the lower social stratum above characterised. That Disraeli had not altered his opinion of it after forty years’ immense and intimate experience is shown by the description in Lothair of the “reception” of “Mrs. Putney Giles.” Not that Disraeli by any means inclined to the “call-a-spade-a-spade” view of conversation. To say all one thought, to be rudely frank, would destroy social converse. “... As Pinto says, if every man were straightforward in his opinions, there would be no conversation. The fun of talk is to find out what a man really thinks, and then contrast it with the enormous lies he has been telling all dinner, and perhaps all his life.” “Never argue,” he once wrote, “and, if controversy arises, change the subject.” And he also recognised that “talk to man about himself, and he will listen for hours.” “All women are vain, some men are not.” He believed, too, in the saying of Swift, that a community of ailments is a fastener of friendship. Once when an intimate asked Lord Beaconsfield what he did when his acquaintanceship was claimed by many whose faces and names were unfamiliar, but who professed to have known him in youth, he answered, “I always say one thing—‘Quite so, quite so! and how is the old complaint?’”
I have said that in his youth Disraeli had occasionally been in debt.[166] No one ever reprobated it more, though no one, except Goldsmith and Sheridan, has also extracted more humour out of it, as is attested by the episode of “Mr. Levison” and the coals in Henrietta Temple.[167] In this novel he thus moralises—