And there are many pendants to this kind of pathetic humour in the sad vagaries, degraded ignorance, sordid joys and squalid sorrows of the operatives of “Wodgate” so sympathetically presented in Sybil:—
“... ‘They call me Tummas, but I ayn’t got no second name; but now I’m married I mean to take my wife’s, for she has been baptised, and so has got two.’ ‘Yes, sir,’ said the girl with the vacant face and the back like a grasshopper, ‘I be a reg’lar born Christian, and my mother afore me, and that’s what few gals in the yard can say. Thomas will take to it himself when work is slack; and he believes now in Our Lord and Saviour Pontius Pilate, who was crucified to save our sins, and in Moses, Goliath, and the rest of the apostles.’ ‘Ah, me!’ thought Morley, ‘and could not they spare one missionary from Tahiti for their fellow-countrymen at Wodgate?’”
* * * * *
I must turn to the romantic and the picturesque in Disraeli’s fiction. It is a large subject, but it need not necessitate a long treatment.
The Brontës and Bulwer Lytton, in opposed spheres and with opposite material, are perhaps the only modern pure romantics in English fiction, before the romantic revival of the last twenty years or so had set in. In the early nineteenth century Sir Walter Scott had headed another romantic revival. Miss Austen, however,—the miniaturist of realism—recalled fiction in her delicate manner to the beaten high-road of the eighteenth. Dickens, romantic by instinct, dwelt on the horrible and grotesque, and was more melodramatic than strictly romantic. Thackeray, sternly combating the infinite romance of his own nature, disclaimed a hero, and proved sentimental rather than romantic. Trollope, who photographed feeling, abominated romance. George Eliot set out as a romantic, but she soon became gloriously whelmed in the vortex of scientific psychology. Others, who lack her imagination, have since followed in her track. We have been treated to analytic presentations of life, where some five persons engage in a mutual war of motive, and the very reasons for turning a door-handle are minutely involved in character. On the one hand, we had the English and French sensationalists elaborately unravelling mysteries; on the other, the boudoir psychologists as elaborately anatomising moods. The great “naturalist” school supervened with its claims to scientise misery. Victor Hugo’s romanticism was doomed by the merciless lancet of these literary surgeons. And throughout—even now, in the main, using “romance” more with regard to situation and expression than to events—the purely and simply heroic and adventurous has lost ground. Mind rather than action engrossed a great part of late nineteenth-century fiction.
With all faults, native and imposed, Disraeli proclaimed in his novels, in those which were political fairy-tales, as in those which were not, “adventures are to the adventurous;” and this very phrase, too, occurs in his earliest satire. Contarini Fleming was originally styled “The Psychological Romance;” Alroy is undoubtedly a romance historical; The Young Duke, a romance of fashion; Vivian Grey, one both of fashion and of ambition; Venetia, of biography; Henrietta Temple, of love; and the rest, romances of the world’s actors and action.
But the extraordinary is merely the mantle of romanticism proper. Its method is everything. It is one that brings up before us at once the thing seen and the man seeing. It releases individuality from stereotyped shackles, it transfers interest from achievement to achievement’s atmosphere, and it lends to landscape-painting the same element that it lends to character-drawing.
The French separate their terms in distinguishing between real and feigned romance. The one they call romantique; the other, romanesque. The really romantic in fiction is so to write as to import into the interest of the extraordinary the interest also of the author’s temperament. Both the unusual subject and the imparted atmosphere are requisites. Rasselas is an unusual subject sententiously treated. It is parable, not romance. The Song of the Shirt is an, alas! commonplace theme transfigured by sympathy. It is pathetic, not romantic. Sir Walter Scott, however, is romantic par excellence. We are sure that his background is unusual, and he stamps his individuality on the foreground. So, too, with his pictures of scenery. The writer’s heart, rather than his head, pervades the perspective. The unromantic author is a showman, the romantic author an actor. The one fits character to persons; the other from persons evolves character. The romantic reveals the wonderful to us by personal feeling. Ruskin once defined the picturesque as “parasitical sublimity;” Carlyle, too (as romantic and picturesque himself as Ruskin), denounces the faculty in which he excelled. But these thinkers failed, perhaps, to grasp that the root of the most beautiful impressions is association interwoven with memory, fancy, affection, even superstition, and the symbols of very names. Strip Venice of her climate, rob man of his memory, and where is the Venice that Ruskin adored? Absolute beauty does exist, but rarely; and we atone for imperfections by supplementing it with the endearments of outward accident. It is Nature’s own method; she garlands the rift of ruins with her greenery. The dead letter sleeps in literature as in life, of which literature ought to be the most sensitive mirror. Warmth is as indispensable as light; and if fiction is to remain an art and not sink into a false science, the dry bones of hard facts must be made to live. By these means, too, the personal influence of great writers is most practically preserved. The wonderful in Nature can never be unnatural. It is only the affectation of it that is so—and that is usually accompanied by Mrs. Malaprop’s “nice derangement of epitaphs.”
Now, so far as Disraeli’s characters merely typify—and they do often—causes or movements, they are not romantic, however picturesque their garb. But so far as they do not, they are essentially romantic, and, where politicians in council are not concerned, this is constantly the case.
Nothing can be more romantic, both in matter and manner, than the first introduction of “Sidonia.” The “Princess Lucretia Colonna” in Coningsby, is romance incarnate. “Morley,” again, in Sybil is a most romantic figure. The whole episode of the “Baronis,” in Tancred, is genuinely and strikingly romantic. So is the figure of “Theodora” in Lothair; and all these occur in political novels. But in the non-political they abound. The early squibs are, perhaps, the only romantic skits in our language. Vivian Grey, too, is full of romance, and comprises the romantic drolleries of “Essper George,” a modern Sancho. The whole of Venetia and all the action of Contarini are romantic; so is his only and halting drama, Alarcos. Though at times, and from causes which I shall consider, there is in these early novels something of old Drury, and too much occasionally of the “Ha!-and-Pah!” attitude, these are only blemishes in the costume; the figures remain romantic.