“... The leaven of the idealists, a pupil of the celebrated Fichte.... The first principle of this school is to reject all expressions which incline in the slightest degree to substantiality.... Matter is his great enemy. My dear sir, observe how exquisitely Nature revenges herself on these capricious and fantastic children. Methinks that the best answer to the idealism of M. Fichte is to see his pupil devouring kalte schale.”
In Lothair few will forget the hero’s musings after the opera attendant’s “Thank you, my lord” had attested the “overpowering honorarium.”
“‘He knows me,’ thought Lothair; but it was not so. When the British nation is at once grateful and enthusiastic, they always call you ‘my lord.’” And in the same novel occurs the admirable humour of the scene at Muriel Towers, where the new French dance which is remembered and at last arranged by the impromptu good humour and cleverness of “Theodora,” is muddled by “Lord Carisbrook,” who sums up his knowledge by “Newest thing in Paris,” yet, notwithstanding, grins afterwards, quite self-satisfied, with his “I am glad I remembered it.”
There remains this light thrust at London architecture—
“Shall we find refuge in a committee of taste, escape from the mediocrity of one to the mediocrity of many?... One suggestion might be made. No profession in England has done its best until it has furnished its victim. The pure administration of justice dates from the deposition of Macclesfield.... Even our boasted navy never achieved a victory until we shot an admiral. Suppose an architect were hanged!”
And, finally, how admirable is the mock epic of the chef’s dilemma at the opening of Tancred: “It is worthy of Boileau.”
“... ‘What you learned from me,’ says Papa Prevost, ‘came at least from a good school. It is something to have served under Napoleon,’ he added, with the grand air of the imperial kitchen. ‘Had it not been for Waterloo, I should have had the cross. But the Bourbons and the Cooks of the Empire never could understand each other. They brought over an emigrant chef who did not comprehend the taste of the age. He wished to bring everything back to the time of the “œil-de-bœuf.” When Monsieur passed my soup of Austerlitz untasted, I knew the old family was doomed..’... ‘We must muster all our forces,’ says the great Leander. ‘There is a want not only of genius but of men in our art. The Cooks are like the civil engineers: since the middle class have taken to giving dinners, the demand exceeds the supply.’ ‘There is Andrien,’ said Papa Prevost; ‘you had some hopes of him.’ ‘He is too young. I took him to Hellingsley, and he lost his head on the third day. I entrusted the soufflés to him, and but for the most desperate personal exertions, all would have been lost. It was an affair of the Bridge of Arcola.’...” How Lilliput and Brobdingnag here combine! I prefer this epic-fantasy to the lyric-fantasy of Thackeray’s “Mirobolant.”
When Disraeli was out of office for the last term, he was walking with a leading member of the Government that had replaced his own. The statesman asked him how he thought the new Administration was getting on. “Pretty well,” was his answer, “but I like the old-fashioned methods. The first year you do nothing; the second year you talk of doing something; the third year you do something—and succeed; the fourth you do something—and fail; the fifth year you spend in discussing whether it was a failure or not; the sixth, you go to the country, who pronounce that it was.”
Most of these are to some degree fanciful persiflage. Not so the following—a passage alluded to in a note already, and compared with another one from Heine. He is describing the Vintage Feast of Tabernacles, and the passage is the more remarkable because Disraeli’s father instances this very festival as one of the obsolete and fanatical absurdities that unfit the Old Testament religion for its proper fulfilment by the New:—
“Picture to yourself the child of Israel in the dingy suburb or the stolid quarter of some bleak Northern town, where there is never a sun that can at any rate ripen grapes; yet he must celebrate the vintage of purple Palestine.... He rises in the morning, goes early to some Whitechapel market, purchases some willow boughs for which he has previously given a commission, and which are brought probably from one of the neighbouring rivers of Essex, hastens home, cleans out the yard of his miserable tenement, builds his bower, decks it even profusely with the finest flowers and fruit he can procure, and hangs its roof with variegated lamps. After the service of his synagogue, he sups late with his wife and children, as if he were in the pleasant villages of Galilee beneath its sweet and starry sky.... Perhaps as he is offering up the peculiar thanksgiving, ... and his wife and children are joining in a pious ‘Hosanna’—that is, ‘Save us’—a party of Anglo-Saxons, very respectable men, ten-pounders, a little elevated, it may be, though certainly not in honour of the vintage, pass the house, and words like these are heard: ‘I say, Buggins, what’s that row?’ ‘Oh, it’s those cursed Jews! We’ve a lot of them. It’s one of their horrible feasts. The Lord Mayor ought to interfere. However, things are not so bad as they used to be. They used always to crucify little boys at their hullabaloos, but now they only eat sausages made of stinking pork.’ ‘To be sure,’ replies his companion, ‘we all make progress.’”