“If youth but knew the fatal misery that they are entailing on themselves the moment they accept a pecuniary credit to which they are not entitled, how they would start in their career! how pale they would turn! how they would tremble, and clasp their hands in agony at the precipice on which they are disporting. Debt is the prolific mother of folly and of crime; it taints the course of life in all its dreams. Hence so many unhappy marriages, so many prostituted pens and venal politicians. It hath a small beginning, but a giant’s growth and strength. When we make the monster we make our master, who haunts us at all hours, and shakes his whip of scorpions forever in our sight. The slave hath no overseer so severe. Faustus, when he signed the bond with blood, did not secure a dream more terrific. But when we are young we must enjoy ourselves. True; and there are few things more gloomy than the recollection of a youth that has not been enjoyed....”
He was never a gambler. One of the most striking passages of Vivian Grey gives the story—which would make a strong play—of a man in high place, led on by even noble motives to game, until he sharped at play, and was rescued from disgrace by friendship; and in The Young Duke is the thrilling romance of the career of the founder of Crockford’s.
The Macaronis were replaced by the Beaux; the Beaux in their turn by the more florid Dandies; until, at last, in the ’seventies, appeared the “Swells,” the heavy, if grand, Blunderbores, sworn to bachelor indulgence, who thought that “every woman should marry, but no man,” the exception only being if a girl sprang from “an affectionate family, with good shooting and first-rate claret.” Disraeli was interested in the “swells.” In a measure he had created them, because he had reconciled the people to the nobles, and the “swell” was a term embodying the people’s homage. But in this phase Disraeli saw something comic and barbaric. “St. Aldegonde,” himself a gigantic “swell,” could not bear the “swells.” When he met them he described them as “a social jungle in which there was a great herd of animals.”
And with the “swells” began something of that “free-and-easiness” which hails from modern Columbia, and has now leavened society with its licence and its slang. “Free-and-easiness is all very well,” once laughed Disraeli to a friend, “but why not be a little freer and a little less easy?” “His spirit,” he says of “Coningsby,” “recoiled from that gross familiarity that is the characteristic of modern manners, and which would destroy all forms and ceremonies, merely because they curb and control their own coarse convenience and ill-disguised selfishness.” With the “swells” came also another social change—the diffusion not only of wealth, but of taste. A great lady assures “Lothair” that he will be surprised to see so many well-dressed and good-looking people at the opera, that he never beheld before.
Political society pervades all Disraeli’s novels. Only two phases of it need here be mentioned. The tiny coteries who dine together twice a week and “think themselves a party.” They appear in Sybil; they reappear in Endymion. And the breakfast gatherings of the ’forties, peculiar, as Disraeli noted, to Liberals. “It shows a restless, revolutionary mind,” mocks “Lady Firebrace,” “that can settle to nothing, but must be running after gossip the moment they are awake.” But two sayings, not directly with regard to society, may in this connection, however, be recorded. Both are from The Young Duke. “... He was always offended and always offending. Such a man could never succeed as a politician—a character who, of all others, must learn to endure, to forget, and to forgive.” The second was prophetic: “One thing is clear—that a man may speak very well in the House of Commons and fail very completely in the House of Lords. There are two distinct styles requisite. I intend in the course of my career, if I have time, to give a specimen of both. In the Lower House, ‘Don Juan’ may perhaps be our model; in the Upper House, ‘Paradise Lost.’”
As for club existence, the “lounging, languid men who spend their time in crossing from Brooks’s to Boodle’s and from Boodle’s to Brooks’s,” has he not characterised “those middle-aged nameless gentlemen of easy circumstances, who haunt clubs and dine a great deal at each others’ houses and chambers; men who travel regularly a little, and gossip regularly a great deal; who lead a sort of facile, slipshod existence, doing nothing, yet mightily interested in what others do; great critics of little things ... peering through the window of a club-house as if they were discovering a planet”? And as for civic hospitality, he sums it up best, perhaps, in the Endymion epigram: “Turtle makes all men equal.”
He felt all along that, after all, true society is at home, and not with “polished ruffians;” the “courtesy of the heart” was preferable to that “of the head.” “My idea of perfect society,” says “Lothair,” “is being married, as I propose, and paying visits to Brentham;” or, as Disraeli varies the theme in the same novel, “I am fond of society that pleases me, that is accomplished and natural and ingenious; otherwise I prefer being alone.” Home, he thought, should be the centre of society, and a homeless society was not one at all. It is very noticeable, in comparing present with past fiction, how the English sense of home and flicker of the fireside, which used to warm every page, has receded out of view before the motor-speed and nervous restlessness of the age. His home-fondness was touchingly displayed after the death of his wife by his reply to a friend, who asked if he were driving home—a reply accompanied by tears; “Home! I have no home now.” Nor did any great man ever reserve the sanctities of the hearth more completely from a prying public. The purity of his home affections was one of Mr. Gladstone’s notes of eulogy in the funeral oration that he delivered in the House to which Disraeli had been proudly devoted for forty-five long years. There are scores of sayings and episodes in his books, from Vivian Grey downwards, regarding the home affections; many charming touches, too, in his letters to his sister. But I content myself with one, from Venetia—
“... After all, we have no friends that we can depend upon in this life but our parents.... All other intimacies, however ardent, are liable to cool; all other confidence, however limited, to be violated. In the phantasmagoria of life, the friend with whom we have cultivated mutual trust for years is often suddenly or gradually estranged from us, or becomes, from painful yet irresistible circumstances, even our deadliest foe. As for women ... the mistresses of our hearts, who has not learnt that the links of passion are fragile as they are glittering?... Where is the enamoured face that smiled upon our early love, and was to shed tears over our grave?... No wonder we grow callous, for how few have the opportunity of returning to the hearth which they quitted in levity or thoughtless weariness, yet which alone is faithful to them; whose sweet affections require not the stimulus of prosperity or fame, the lure of accomplishments or the tribute of flattery, but which are constant to us in distress, and console us even in disgrace!”
I ought, perhaps, to add a word of Disraeli’s ideas on love and marriage. No one set more store by, or laid more store on, the deciding influence of woman on man’s career. No one recognised more heartily a woman’s instinctive superiority to logic. How good is the humour in that dressing-room scene of the ’seventies in Lothair:—
“... The gentlemen of the smoking-room have it not all their own way quite as much as they think. If, indeed, a new school of Athens were to be pictured, the sages and the students might be represented in exquisite dressing-gowns, with slippers rarer than the lost one of Cinderella, and brandishing beautiful brushes over tresses still more fair. Then is the time when characters are never more finely drawn, or difficult social questions more accurately solved; knowledge without reasoning, and truth without logic—the triumph of intuition! But we must not profane the mysteries of Bona Dea.”