"Tancred," published in 1847, completes the trilogy, which
began with "Coningsby" in 1844, and had its second volume in
"Sybil" in 1845. In these three novels Disraeli gave to the
world his political, social, and religious philosophy.
"Coningsby" was mainly political, "Sybil" mainly social, and
in "Tancred," as the author tells us, Disraeli dealt with the
origin of the Christian Church of England and its relation to
the Hebrew race whence Christianity sprang. "Public opinion
recognized the truth and sincerity of these views," although
their general spirit ran counter to current Liberal
utilitarianism. Although "Tancred" lacks the vigour of "Sibyl"
and the wit of "Coningsby," it is full of the colour of the
East, and the satire and irony in the part relating to
Tancred's life in England are vastly entertaining. As in
others of Disraeli's novels, many of the characters here are
portraits of real personages.
_I.--Tancred Goes Forth on His Quest_
Tancred, the Marquis of Montacute, was certainly strangely distracted on
his twenty-first birthday. He stood beside his father, the Duke of
Bellamont, in the famous Crusaders' gallery in the Castle of Montacute,
listening to the congratulations which the mayor and corporation of
Montacute town were addressing to him; but all the time he kept his eyes
fixed on the magnificent tapestries from which the name of the gallery
was derived. His namesake, Tancred of Montacute, had distinguished
himself in the Third Crusade by saving the life of King Richard at the
siege of Ascalon, and his exploits were depicted on the fine Gobelins
work hanging on the walls of the great hall. Oblivious of the gorgeous
ceremony in which he was playing the principal part, the young Marquis
of Montacute stared at the pictures of the Crusader, and a wild,
fantastical idea took hold of him.
He was the only child of the Duke of Bellamont, and all the high
nobility of England were assembled to celebrate his coming of age.
Everything that fortune could bestow seemed to have been given to him.
He was the heir of the greatest and richest of English dukes, and his
life was made smooth and easy. His father had got a seat in parliament
waiting for him, and his mother had already selected a noble and
beautiful young lady for his wife. Neither of them had yet consulted
their son, but Tancred was so sweet and gentle a boy that they did not
dream he would oppose their wishes. They had planned out his life for
him ever since he was born, with the view to educating him for the
position which he was to occupy in the English aristocracy, and he had
always taken the path which they had chosen for him.
In the evening, the duke summoned his son into his library.
"My dear Tancred," he said, "I have a piece of good news for you on your
birthday. Hungerford feels that he cannot represent our constituency now
that you have come of age, and, with great kindness, he is resigning his
seat in your favour. He says that the Marquis of Montacute ought to
stand for the town of Montacute, so you will be able to enter parliament
at once."
"But I do not wish to enter parliament," said Tancred.
The duke leant back from his desk with a look of painful surprise on his
face.
"Not enter parliament?" he exclaimed. "Every Lord Montacute has gone
into the House of Commons before taking his seat in the House of Lords.
It is an excellent training."
"I am not anxious to enter the House of Lords either," said Tancred.
"And I hope, my dear father," he added, with a smile that lit up his
young, grave, beautiful face, "that it will be very, very long before I
succeed to your place there."
"What, then, do you intend to do, my boy?" said Bellamont, in intense
perplexity. "You are the heir to one of the greatest positions in the
state, and you have duties to perform. How are you going to fit yourself
for them?"
"That is what I have been thinking of for years," said Tancred. "Oh, my
dear father, if you knew how long and earnestly I have prayed for
guidance! Yes, I have duties to perform! But in this wild, confused, and
aimless age of ours, what man can see what his duties are? For my part,
I cannot find that it is my duty to maintain the present order of
things. In nothing in our religion, our government, our manners, do I
find faith. And if there is no faith, how can there be any duty? We have
ceased to be a nation. We are a mere crowd, kept from utter anarchy by
the remains of an old system which we are daily destroying."
"But what would you do, my dear boy?" said the duke, pale with anxiety.
"Have you found any remedy?"
"No," said Tancred mournfully. "There is no remedy to be found in
England. Oh, let me save myself, father! Let me save our people from the
corruption and ruin that threaten us!"
"But what do you want to do? Where do you want to go?" said the duke.
"I want to go to God!" cried the young nobleman, his blue eyes flaming
with a strange light "How is it that the Almighty Power does not send
down His angels to enlighten us in our perplexities? Where is the
Paraclete, the Comforter Who was promised us? I must go and seek him."
"You are a visionary, my boy," said the duke, gazing at him in blank
astonishment.
"Was the Montacute that fought by the side of King Richard in the Holy
Land a visionary?" said Tancred. "All I ask is to be allowed to follow
in his footsteps. For three days and three nights he knelt in prayer at
the tomb of his Redeemer. Six centuries and more have gone by since
then. It is high time that we renewed our intercourse with the Most High
in the country of His chosen people. I, too, would kneel at that tomb.
I, too, surrounded by the holy hills and groves of Jerusalem, would lift
my voice to Heaven, and ask for inspiration."
"But surely God will hear your prayers in England as well as in
Palestine?"
"No," said his son. "He has never raised up a prophet or a great saint
in this country. If we want Him to speak to us as He spoke to the men of
old, we must go, like the Crusaders, to the Holy Land."
Finding that he could not turn his son from the strange course on which
he was bent, the duke got a great prelate to try and persuade him that
all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
"We live in an age of progress," reasoned the philosophic bishop.
"Religion is spreading with the spread of civilisation. How all our
towns are growing! We shall soon see a bishop in Manchester."
"I want to see an angel in Manchester," replied Tancred.
It was no use arguing with a man who talked in this way, and the duke
gave Tancred permission to set out on his new crusade.
_II.--The Vigil by the Tomb_
The moon sank behind the Mount of Olives, leaving the towers, minarets,
and domes of Jerusalem in deep shadow; the lamps in the city went out,
and every outline was lost in gloom; but the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre still shone in the darkness like a beacon light. There, while
every soul in Jerusalem slumbered, Tancred knelt in prayer by the tomb
of Christ, under the lighted dome, waiting for the fire from heaven to
strike into his soul.
His strange vigil was the talk of Syria. It is remarkable how quickly
news travels in the East.
"Do you know," said Besso, Rothschild's agent, to his foster-son
Fakredeen, an emir of Lebanon, as they sat talking in a house near the
gate of Sion, "the young Englishman has brought me such a letter that if
he were to tell me to rebuild Solomon's temple, I must do it!"
"He must be fabulously rich!" said Fakredeen, with a sigh. "What has he
come here for? The English do not come on pilgrimages. They are all
infidels."
"Well, he has come on a pilgrimage," said Besso, "and he is the greatest
of English princes. He kneels all night and day in the church over
there."
Yes, after a week of solitude, fasting, and prayer, Tancred was keeping
vigil before the empty Sepulchre, where Tancred of Montacute had knelt
six hundred years before. Day after day, night after night, he prayed
for inspiration, but no divine voice broke in upon his impassioned
reveries. It was for him that Alonzo Lara, the prior of Terra Santa,
kept the light burning all night long at the Holy Sepulchre, for the
Spaniard had been moved by the deep faith of the young English nobleman.
And one day he said to him:
"Sinai led to Calvary. I think it would be wise for you to trace the
path backward from Calvary to Sinai."
It was extremely perilous at that time to adventure into the great
desert, for the wild Bedouin tribes were encamped there. But, in spite
of this, Tancred made arrangements with an Arabian chief, Sheikh Hassan,
and set out for Sinai at the head of a well-armed band of Arabs.
"Ah!" said the sheikh, as they entered the mountainous country, after a
three days' march across the wilderness. "Look at these tracks of horses
and camels in the defile. The marks are fresh. See that your guns are
primed!" he cried to his men.
As he spoke a troop of wild horsemen galloped down the ravine.
"Hassan," one of them shouted, "is that the brother of the Queen of the
English with you? Let him ride with us, and you may return in peace."
"He is my brother, too," said Hassan. "Stand aside, you sons of Eblis,
or you shall bite the earth."
A wild shout from every height of the defile was the answer. Tancred
looked up. The crest on either side was lined with Bedouins, each with
his musket levelled.
"There is only one thing for us to do," said Tancred to Hassan. "Let us
charge through the defile, and die like men!"
Seizing his pistols, he shot the first horseman through the head, and
disabled another. Then he charged down the ravine, and Hassan and his
men followed, and scattered the horsemen before them. The Bedouins fired
down on them from the crests, and, in a few moments, the place was
filled with smoke, and Tancred could not see a yard around him. Still he
galloped on, and the smoke suddenly drifted, and he found himself at the
mouth of the defile, with a few followers behind him. A crowd of
Bedouins were waiting for him.
"Die fighting! Die fighting!" he shouted. Then his horse stumbled,
stabbed from beneath by a Bedouin dagger, and fell in the sand. Before
he could get his feet out of the stirrups, he was overpowered and bound.
"Don't hurt him," said the Bedouin chief. "Every drop of his blood is
worth ten thousand piastres."
Late that night, as Amalek, the great Rechabite Bedouin sheikh, was
sitting before his tent, a horseman rode up to him.
"Salaam," he cried. "Sheikh of sheikhs, it is done! The brother of the
Queen of England is your slave!"
"Good!" said Amalek. "May your mother eat the hump of a young camel! Is
the brother of the queen with Sheikh Salem?"
"No," said the horseman, "Sheikh Salem is in paradise, and many of our
men are with him. The brother of the Queen of the English is a mighty
warrior. He fought like a lion, but we brought his horse down at last
and took him alive."
"Good!" said Amalek. "Camels shall be given to all the widows of the men
he has killed, and I will find them new husbands. Go and tell Fakredeen
the good news!"
Amalek and Fakredeen would not have cared had they lost a hundred men in
the affair. The Bedouin chief and the emir of Lebanon could bring into
the field more than twenty thousand lances, and the capture of Tancred
was part of a political scheme which they were engineering for the
conquest of Syria. They knew from Besso that the young English prince
was fabulously rich, and, as they wanted arms, they meant to hold him to
the extraordinary ransom of two million piastres.
"My foster father will pay it," said Fakredeen. "He told me that he
would have to rebuild Solomon's temple if the English prince asked him
to. We will get him to help us rebuild Solomon's empire."
_III.--The Vision on the Mount_
On the wild granite scarp of Mount Sinai, about seven thousand feet
above the blue seas that lave its base, is a small plain hemmed in by
pinnacles of rock. In the centre of the plain are a cypress tree and a
fountain. This is the traditional scene of the greatest event in the
history of mankind. It was here that Moses received the divine laws on
which the civilisation of the world is based.
Tancred of Montacute knelt down on the sacred soil, and bowed his head
in prayer. Far below him, in one of the green-valleys sloping down to
the sea, Fakredeen and a band of Bedouins pitched their tents for the
night, and talked in awed tones of their strange companion. Wonderful is
the power of soul with which a great idea endues a man. The young emir
of Lebanon and his men were no longer the captors of Tancred, but his
followers. He had preached to them with the eyes of flame and the words
of fire of a prophet; and they now asked of him, not a ransom, but a
revelation. They wanted him to bring down from Sinai the new word of
power, which would bind their scattered tribes into a mighty nation,
with a divine mission for all the world.
What was this word to be? Tancred did not know any more than his
followers, and he knelt all day long under the Arabian sun, waiting for
the divine revelation. The sunlight faded, and the shadows fell around
him, and he still remained bowed in a strange, quiet ecstasy of
expectation. But at last, lifting up his eyes to the clear, starry sky
of Arabia, he prayed:
"O Lord God of Israel, I come to Thine ancient dwelling-place to pour
forth the heart of tortured Europe. Why does no impulse from Thy
renovating will strike again into the soul of man? Faith fades and duty
dies, and a profound melancholy falls upon the world. Our kings cannot
rule, our priests doubt, and our multitudes toil and moan, and call in
their madness upon unknown gods. If this transfigured mount may not
again behold Thee, if Thou wilt not again descend to teach and console
us, send, oh send, one of the starry messengers that guard Thy throne,
to save Thy creatures from their terrible despair!"
As he prayed all the stars of Arabia grew strangely dim. The wild peaks
of Sinai, standing sharp and black in the lucid, purple air, melted into
shadowy, changing masses. The huge branches of the cypress-tree moved
mysteriously above his head, and he fell upon the earth senseless and in
a trance.
It seemed to Tancred that a mighty form was bending over him with a
countenance like an oriental night, dark yet lustrous, mystical yet
clear. The solemn eyes of the shadowy apparition were full of the
brightness and energy of youth and the calm wisdom of the ages.
"I am the Angel of Arabia," said the spectral figure, waving a sceptre
fashioned like a palm-tree, "the guardian spirit of the land which
governs the world; for its power lies neither in the sword nor in the
shield, for these pass away, but in ideas which are divine. All the
thoughts of every nation come from a higher power than man, but the
thoughts of Arabia come directly from the Most High. You want a new
revelation to Christendom? Listen to the ancient message of Arabia!
"Your people now hanker after other gods than the God of Sinai and
Calvary. But the eternal principles of that Arabian faith, which moulded
them from savages into civilised men when they descended from their
northern forests fifteen hundred years ago, and spread all over the
world, can alone breathe new vigour into them, now that they are
decaying in the dust and fever of their great cities. Tell them that
they must cease from seeking in their vain philosophies for the solution
of their social problems. Their, longing for the brotherhood of mankind
can only be satisfied when they acknowledge the sway of a common father.
Tell them that they are the children of God. Announce the sublime and
solacing doctrine of theocratic equality. Fear not, falter not. Obey the
impulse of thine own spirit, and find a ready instrument in every human
being."
A sound as of thunder roused Tancred from his trance. Above him the
mountains rose sharp and black in the clear purple air, and the Arabian
stars shone with undimmed brightness; but the voice of the angel still
lingered in his ear. He went down the mountain; at its base he found his
followers sleeping amid their camels. He aroused Fakredeen, and told him
that he had received the word which would bind together the warring
nations of Arabia and Palestine, and reshape the earth.
_IV.--The Mystic Queen_
"It has been a great day," said Tancred to Fakredeen, as they were
sitting some months afterwards in the castle of the young emir of
Lebanon, where all the princes of Syria had assembled to discuss the
foundation of the new empire. "If your friends will only work together
as they promise, Syria is ours."
"Even Lebanon," said Fakredeen, "can send forth more than fifty thousand
well-armed footmen, and Amalek is gathering all the horsemen of the
desert, from Petraea to Yemen, under our banner. If we can only win over
the Ansarey," he continued, "we shall have all Syria and Arabia as a
base for our operations."
"The Ansarey?" exclaimed Tancred. "They hold the mountains around
Antioch, which are the key of Palestine, don't they? What is their
religion? Do you think that the doctrine of theocratic equality would
appeal to them as it did to the Arabians?"
"I don't know," said the emir. "They never allow strangers to enter
their country. They are a very ancient people, and they fight so well in
their mountains that even the Turks have not been able to conquer them."
"But can't we make overtures?" said Tancred.
"That is what I have done," said Fakredeen. "The Queen of the Ansarey
has heard about you, and I have arranged that we should go and see her
as soon as the Syrian assembly was over. Everything is ready for our
journey, so, if you like, we will start at once."
It was a difficult expedition, as the Queen of the Ansarey was then
waging war on the Turkish pasha of Aleppo. Happily, the travellers came
upon a band of Ansareys who were raiding the Turkish province, and were
led by them through their black ravines to the fortress palace of the
queen.
She received them, sitting on her divan, clothed in a purple robe, and
shrouded in a long veil. This she took off when Tancred came towards
her, and he marvelled at the strangeness of her beauty. There was
nothing oriental about her. She was a Greek girl of the ancient type,
with violet eyes, fair cheeks, and dark hair.
"Prince," she said, "we are a people who wish neither to see nor to be
seen. We do not care what goes on in the world around. Our mountains are
wild and barren, but while Apollo dwells among us, we do not care for
gold, or silk, or jewels."
"Apollo!" cried Tancred. "Are the gods of Olympus still worshipped on
earth?"
"Yes, Apollo still lives among us, and another greater than Apollo,"
said the young queen, looking at Tancred long and earnestly. "Follow me,
and you shall now behold the secret of the Ansarey."
Her maidens adorned her with a garland of roses, and put a garland on
the head of Tancred, and she led him through a portal of bronze, down an
underground passage, into an Ionic temple, filled with the white and
lovely forms of the gods of ancient Greece.
"Do you know this?" said the queen to Tancred, looking at a statue in
golden ivory, and then at the young Englishman, whose clear-cut features
and hyacinthine locks curiously resembled those of the carven image.
"It is Phoebus Apollo," said Tancred, and, moved by admiration at the
beauty of the figure, he murmured some lines of Homer.
"Ah, you know all!" cried the queen. "You know our secret language. Yes,
this is Phoebus Apollo. He used to stand in Antioch in the ancient days
before the Christians drove us into the mountains. And look," she said,
pointing to the statue beside Apollo, "here is the Syrian goddess before
whom the pilgrims of the world once knelt. She is named Astarte, and I
am called after her."
"Oh, angels watch over me!" said Tancred to himself as Queen Astarte
fixed her violet eyes upon him with a glance of love that could not be
mistaken, and led him back into the hall of audience.
There he saw Fakredeen bending over a maiden with a flower-like face,
and large, dark, lustrous eyes.
"She is my foster-sister, Eva," said Fakredeen. "The Ansareys captured
her on the plain of Aleppo."
Tancred had met Eva at the house of Besso in Jerusalem, but she did not
then exercise over him the strange charm which now drew him to her side.
It seemed to him that the beautiful Jewish girl had been sent to help
him in his struggle against the heathen spells of Astarte. As he was
meditating how he could rescue her, a messenger came in, and announced
that the pasha of Aleppo had invaded the mountains at the head of 5,000
troops.
"Ah!" cried Astarte. "Few of them will ever see Aleppo again. I have
25,000 men under arms, and you, my prince," she said, turning to
Tancred, "shall command them."
Tancred had learnt something of the arts of mountain warfare from Sheikh
Amalek. He allowed the Turkish troops to penetrate into the heart of the
wild hills, and then, as they were marching down a long defile, he
attacked them from the crests above, shooting them down like sheep and
burying them in avalanches of rolling rock. Instead of returning to the
fortress palace, he sent his men on ahead, and rode out alone into the
desert, and went through the Syrian wilderness back to Jerusalem.
Riding up to the door of Besso's house by Sion gate, he asked if there
were any news of Eva. A negro led him into a garden, and there, sitting
by the side of a fountain, was the lovely Jewish maiden.
"So Fakredeen brought you safely away, Eva," he said tenderly. "I was
afraid that Astarte meant to harm you."
"She would have killed me," said Eva, "if she could. I am afraid that
your faith in your idea of theocratic equality has been destroyed by the
Ansareys. How can you build up an empire in a land divided by so many
jarring creeds? Do you still believe in Arabia?"
"I believe in Arabia," cried Tancred, kneeling down at her feet,
"because I believe in you. You are the angel of Arabia, and the angel of
my life. You cannot guess what influence you have had on my fate. You
came into my life like another messenger from God. Thanks to you, my
faith has never faltered. Will you not share it, dearest?"
He clasped her hand, and gazed with passionate adoration into her face.
As her head fell upon his shoulder, the negro came running to the
fountain.
"The Duke of Bellamont!" he said to Tancred.
Tancred looked up, and saw the Duke of Bellamont coming through the
pomegranate trees of the garden.
"Father," he said, advancing towards the duke, "I have found my mission
in life, and I am going to marry this lady."
* * * * *