I have mentioned Disraeli’s early tendency towards “Ha!” and “Pah!” For this there were several reasons besides his own temper and that of the time.
When we speak of an “artificial” style we mean one unnatural to the author. Disraeli’s style was perfectly natural to him, and it altered little. To impose another man’s voice on our own is real artifice. How natively pathetic he could be, is shown by the scene in Vivian Grey, where the broken Cleveland sits and sobs amid the laughing children on his lonely bench in Kensington Gardens; and how simply pleasing, by the encounter after long years between “Coningsby” and “Lady Theresa.” He constantly alternates between the homely and the outlandish.
In the few years preceding his grand tour, and, still more, the earlier Vivian Grey, he was at a phase in his development when he was only just beginning to realise the true bent of his powers, of which he had from the first been conscious, but which had hitherto more or less perplexed and bewildered him. In Alroy and Contarini his tone is one of savage force as yet unchastened and unmellowed. The wild Arab is in them. All the over-mastering dreams of his youth claimed materialisation; his language went before his feelings, and strove to outrun them by vehement strokes of attitude. He thirsted for action, and yet drooped, restless and mortified. His circumstances were at war with his consuming ambitions. It was the discord of a peculiar fate and an unique organisation; the ferment of a ripe spirit cooped by unripe experience, of an as yet untempered vigour. The genius, as in the old legend, shrank and dwindled in the bottle, but soared with gigantic stature when the stopper was released. One must not take the personal touches in Vivian, Alroy, and Contarini too literally. They are a blend of several factors and of various characters; and he himself in his age regretted that the last had been the task of immaturity. But from the main emphasis and the prevailing moods of the three together, thus much one may gather.
“Why, what is life” (this from Alroy), “for meditation mingles ever with my passion?... Throw accidents to the dogs, and tear off the painted mask of false society! Here am I, a hero; with a mind that can devise all things, and a heart of superhuman daring, with youth, with vigour, with a glorious lineage ... and I am—nothing.” He was morbidly overdone, and he brooded and overdid his own morbidity. He had lived in “a private world and a public world,” and the two were still at variance. “I was,” he says extravagantly of a still earlier date, on the lips of “Contarini,” “in these days but a wild beast who thought himself a civilised human being;” and yet “I felt the conviction that literary creation was necessary to my existence.”—“What vanity in all the empty bustle of common life! It brings to me no gratification; on the contrary, degrading annoyance. It develops all the lowering attributes of my nature.” He was impatient, and yet he felt that “patience is a necessary ingredient of genius.” “Nothing is more fatal than to be seduced into composition by the first flutter of the imagination.” He had aspired to be a poet, and a poet in a new style befitting modern life. The failure of the Revolutionary Epick disgusted him; yet how could he have expected it to succeed? even if it had been sold at a farthing, as in the case of Mr. Horne’s experiment, it would never have attracted the public, for it was a long essay in stilted verse.[176] He still aspired to influence and rule his fellow-men, but no path was clear. These moods were not to last. “Think of me as of some exotic bird which for a moment lost its way in thy cold heaven, but has now regained its course and wings its flight to a more brilliant earth, and a brighter sky.”
Moreover, he had for some years fostered the idea that verse was obsolete for poetry, and that rhyme was a solecism. Poetry should be the revelation of nature, and yet it had sought a modern vent in unnatural language.[177] He attempted, therefore, to frame a language for poetical expression on a plan of his own, at once rhythmical and theatrical. And for all his confidence he was not wholly at ease. “I observed that I was the slave of custom, and never viewed any particular incident in relation to men in general.... I deeply felt that there was a total want of nature in everything connected with me.”—“When I look back on myself at this period, I have difficulty in conceiving a more unamiable character.” And yet instinct revolted against artificiality. In defiance he would air his most extreme passions. To veil them was cant. “Never apologise for showing feeling.... Remember that when you do so, you apologise for truth.”
But if something of all this is applicable to 1829, still more is applicable to three years earlier, when Vivian Grey—a miracle, whatever its defects, for one barely out of his nonage—was published;[178] and much of the phase was only a remnant of its aggravated form in 1826. He had been seriously and mysteriously ill. He had small acquaintance with the great world, and continual conversance with his visions of it. He was in doubt, even in despair. His family was astonished, even annoyed. In Contarini, where his first novel figures as “Manstein,” he has himself told us what he regretted in Vivian Grey. It was “written in a storm and without any reflection;” its few images were all “probably copied from books.”—“I thought of ‘Manstein’ as of a picture painted by a madman in the dark.”—“I determined to re-educate myself.” Years afterwards, when these fleeting phases had long passed, and had been succeeded by the higher and healthier moods following on the discovery and pursuit of his true destiny, he apologised for Vivian Grey as a boyish freak, affected because not written from observation of the world, and he added that every one has a right to be conceited until he is successful. He showed his opinion of it by publishing Contarini anonymously. In his old age, he excused its “inevitable reappearance” by once remarking that first efforts dealing with a big but unknown world must be exaggerated in style, and that “false taste accompanies exaggeration.” Had he been grandiose without afterwards proving himself great, the blame would have been deserved.
These are not the blemishes of his great political novels; but there is in them also, with all their deep thought and striking insight, their absolute originality and stimulating suggestiveness, an air at times of the perfumer’s shop rather than of the fresh air. Even “Sybil” cries out, “Oh! the saints, ’tis a merry morn!” “Coningsby” meets his lady-love at a ball, which “is a dispensation of almost supernatural ecstasy;” and in Lothair itself we revert to “barbs” and “jennets.” I think that these later defects were partly due to the reaction against the constraint, repression, and formality compelled by his political career. They were a reaction in form, but in no case were they artificial in substance. They meant something, and they pressed it home. Disraeli was always a fantastic, and the fantastic holds high rank in literature. It distinguishes Disraeli’s pet, Cervantes. But fantasy is different far from frippery. Fantasy is the flicker of firelight, not the flare of gas.
Again, it is always hard for originality to win a first hearing from the public. Browning once remarked in a letter that to fasten the attention of the British public some stroke of style is required. This is true. Browning is himself an example; Carlyle, another; for his early essays completely lack that compound of Jean Paul’s German, and old Mrs. Carlyle’s Scotch, out of which Carlylese was evolved. Ruskin is another instance. Disraeli in his correspondence is far more free and flowing than in his books. Of those books there is least trace of apparent affectation in Coningsby, which is the best political novel in any language. Reviewed as a whole, his novels are creative, and a marvellous medium for thought. Some bedizenment there is doubtless, and there are many gauds of fancy; and parts of the characterisation may be said to be written in italics. It is true also that some of the persons are waxworks, but none of the characters are, and his movement of ideas, as well as his ideas of movement, display a flexibility rarely joined to such piercing penetration. Next to his three great political novels and in some respects above them, I would rank Venetia, which has never met with such widespread appreciation. Alroy and Contarini are psychological romances, exceptional of their kind. His method of composition was the same throughout his life. He pondered in the night what he penned in the morning. And of his early preparation he has left a memorial—
“... I prepared myself for composition in a very different mood from that in which I had poured forth my fervid crudities in the Garden-house. Calm and collected, I constructed characters on philosophical principles, and mused over a chain of action which should develop the system of our existence. All was art. I studied contrasts and grouping, and metaphysical analysis was substituted for anatomical delineation. I was not satisfied that the conduct of my creatures should be influenced merely by the general principles of their being; I resolved that they should be the very impersonations of the moods and passions of our mind. One was ill-regulated will;[179] another offered the formation of a moral being;[180] materialism sparkled in the wild gaiety and reckless caprice of one voluptuous girl, while spirit was vindicated in the deep devotion of a constant and enthusiastic heroine.[181] Even the lighter temperaments were not forgotten. Frivolity smiled and shrugged her shoulders before us, and there was even a deep personification of cynic humour.”
He believed in the influence of the creative arts on creative authorship. He has pointed out how the Tuscan school of painting trains to the grandeur of simplicity, the Venetian to the gorgeousness of fancy. And of music he has written: “The greatest advantage that a writer can derive from it is that it teaches most exquisitely the art of development. It is in remarking the varying recurrence of a great composer to the same theme, that a poet may learn how to dwell upon the phases of a passion,—how to exhibit a mood of mind under all its alterations, and gradually to pour forth the full tide of feeling.” But he thought that such influences were a prelude to creation, not to execution. “It is well to meditate upon a subject under the influence of music, but to execute we should be alone, and supported only by our essential and internal strength.”