As is familiar, he was fastidious even when he was florid. It is well known that he relieved his last illness by correcting the proofs of his last speeches for Hansard—“the Dunciad of Politics.” “I will not,” he said, “descend to history speaking bad grammar.”
About national literature he held views which sprang from his theories of race. He considered that modern Europe depended overmuch on ideas derived from Rome, Greece, and Palestine. “At the revival of letters we beheld the portentous spectacle of national poets communicating their inventions in an exotic form.... They sought variety in increased artifice of diction, and substituted the barbaric clash of rhyme for the melody of the lyre....” Spain, he thought, offered the best field for a national novel.
“The outdoor life of the natives induces a variety of the most picturesque manners, while their semi-civilisation makes each district retain with barbarous jealousy its peculiar customs.”
For the critics he had a smile at the first as at the last. They “admired what had been written in haste and without premeditation, and generally disapproved of what had cost me much forethought and been executed with great care.... My perpetual efforts at being imaginative were highly reprobated.... I puzzled them, and no one offered a prediction as to my future career.... I thought no more of criticism. The breath of man has never influenced me much, for I depend more upon myself than upon others....”
At “Reisenburg” in Vivian Grey were two great journals edited on opposite principles. In the one, every review was written by a personal enemy; in the other by a personal friend. And there was a third by that “literary comet,” “Von Chronicle,” the historical novelist, who believed that in romance costume was superior to character. His novel of “Rienzi” terminated with the scene of the Coronation, because “after that, what is there in the career of Rienzi which would afford matter...? All that afterwards occurs is a mere contest of passions and a development of character; but where is a procession, or a triumph, or a marriage...? Not a single name is given in the work for which he has not contemporary authority; but what he is particularly proud of are his oaths. Nothing has cost him more trouble than the management of the swearing; and the Romans, you know, are a most profane nation.... The ‘’sblood’ of the sixteenth century must not be confounded with the ‘zounds’ of the seventeenth.... The most amusing thing is to contrast this mode of writing works of fiction with the prevalent and fashionable mode of writing works of history.... Here we write novels like history and history like novels. All our facts are fancy, and all our imagination reality.”
Excellent fooling, this! Through the long range of his writings Disraeli did more than any novelist of the nineteenth century to impress on the ordinary mind not only the pleasures but the powers of the Imagination.
CHAPTER X
CAREER
The secrets of success, Disraeli has told us more than once, are knowledge of your capacities, constancy of purpose, and mastery of your subject. It is seldom that in one brain these qualities of grip, mental and moral, are fully combined; and, rarer still, when they do reside together, is the addition of the third requisite named by him—patience. It, with the tact it bears, is as necessary for the servant as the master.