But it is, perhaps, in the short but charming descriptions of character and of scenery that Disraeli best showed his powers for the romantic and the picturesque. Take the character of “Fakredeen;” take even the character of Sir Robert Peel in the Life of Lord George Bentinck. Take a hundred touches from his Home Letters, and those to his sister and family. He there says that “description is a bore,” but he contrived in a few strokes to picture without describing. The sunset at Athens, “like the neck of a dove.” His vignettes of the Parthenon, of the Lagoons, of Jerusalem, of Syria, both here and in Contarini, Tancred, and Lothair, are etched by a master-hand.
Disraeli casts over his scenes the reflected glow of associative feeling. Peruse the beautiful rendering of “Marney Abbey” in Sybil (too long to quote). It is essentially a placid scene romantically described, with an individual feeling of soft regret and tender awe communicated to the dreamy landscape. It proves his delight in what he called “the sweet order of country life;” his feeling for the “order of the peasantry ... succeeded by a race of serfs who are called labourers and burn ricks.”
If we would note the contrast in unromantic writers of genius, we have only to re-read Jane Austen’s description of Northanger Abbey, where, be it marked, in purposely deriding the false romance of a girl’s sickly fancy, she must have desired to depict the demesne with every impressive attribute.
And take this from Tancred: “Sometimes the land is cleared, and he finds himself by the homestead of a forest farm.... Still advancing the deer become rarer, and the road is formed by an avenue of chestnuts.... Persons are moving to and fro on the side-path of the road. Horsemen and carts seem returning from market; women with empty baskets, and then the rare vision of a stage-coach. The postillion spurs his horses, cracks his whip, and dashes at full gallop into the town of Montacute, the capital of the forest.... Nor does this green domain terminate till it touches the vast and purple moors that divide the kingdoms of Great Britain.”
The effects of light play a leading part in Disraeli’s landscapes.
“... Nor is there, indeed, a sight” (of Mont Blanc in Contarini) “more lovely than to watch at decline of day the last embrace of the sun lingering on the rosy glaciers. Soon, too soon, the great luminary dies; the warm peaks subside into purple, and then die into a ghostly white: but soon, and not too soon, the moon springs up from behind a mountain, flings over the lake a stream of light, and the sharp glaciers glitter like silver.”
This, too, of night in Venice—
“... The music and the moon reign supreme.... Around on every side are palaces and temples rising from the waves which they shadow with their solemn form, their costly fronts rich with the spoils of kingdoms and softened with the magic of the midnight beam. The whole city, too, is poured forth for festival. The people lounge on the quays and cluster on the bridges; the light barks skim along in crowds, just touching the surface of the water, while their bright prows of polished iron gleam in the moonshine and glitter in the rippling wave. Not a sound that is not graceful—the tinkle of guitars, the sighs of serenaders, and the responsive chorus of gondoliers. Now and then a laugh, light, joyous, and yet musical, bursts forth from some illuminated coffee-house, before which a buffo disports....”
Here, again, is an English summer morning from Sybil—
“A bloom was spread over the morning sky; a soft golden light bathed with its fresh sheen the bosom of the valley, except where a delicate haze rather than a mist still partially lingered over the river, which yet occasionally gleamed and sparkled in the sunshine. A sort of shadowy lustre suffused the landscape, which, though distinct, was mitigated in all its features—the distant woods, the clumps of tall trees that rose about the old grey bridge, the cottage chimneys that sent their smoke into the blue, still air, amid their clustering orchards and gardens, flowers and herbs.”