Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, born in London, December, 1804;
died there April 19th, 1881. His paternal ancestors were of the house of
Lara, and held high rank among Hebrew-Spanish nobles till the tribunal
of Torquemada drove them from Spain to Venice. There, proud of their
race and origin, they styled themselves, "Sons of Israel," and became
merchant princes. But the city's commerce failing, the grandfather of
Benjamin Disraeli removed to London with a diminished but comfortable
fortune. His son, Isaac Disraeli, was a well-known literary man, and the
author of 'The Curiosities of Literature.' On account of the political
and social ostracism of the Jews in England, he had all his family
baptized into the Church of England; but with Benjamin Disraeli
especially, Christianity was never more than Judaism developed. His
belief and his affections were in his own race.
[Illustration: Lord Beaconsfield]
Benjamin, like most Jewish youths, was educated in private schools, and
at seventeen entered a solicitor's office. At twenty-two he published
'Vivian Grey' (London, 1826), which readable and amusing take-off of
London society gave him great and instantaneous notoriety. Its minute
descriptions of the great world, its caricatures of well-known social
and political personages, its magnificent diction,--too magnificent to
be taken quite seriously,--excited inquiry; and the great world was
amazed to discover that the impertinent observer was not one of
themselves, but a boy in a lawyer's office. To add to the audacity, he
had conceived himself the hero of these diverting situations, and by his
cleverness had outwitted age, beauty, rank, diplomacy itself.
Statesmen, poets, fine ladies, were all genuinely amused; and the author
bade fair to become a lion, when he fell ill, and was compelled to leave
England for a year or more, which he spent in travel on the Continent
and in Egypt, Nubia, and Palestine. His visit to the birthplace of his
race made an impression on him that lasted through his life and
literature. It is embodied in his 'Letters to His Sister' (London,
1843), and the autobiographical novel 'Contarini Fleming' (1833), in
which he turned his adventures into fervid English, at a guinea a
volume. But although the spirit of poesy, in the form of a Childe
Harold, stalks rampant through the romance, there is both feeling and
fidelity to nature whenever he describes the Orient and its people. Then
the bizarre, brilliant _poseur_ forgets his rôle, and reveals his
highest aspirations.
When Disraeli returned to London he became the fashion. Everybody, from
the prime minister to Count D'Orsay, had read his clever novels. The
poets praised them, Lady Blessington invited him to dine, Sir Robert
Peel was "most gracious."
But literary success could never satisfy Disraeli's ambition: a seat in
Parliament was at the end of his rainbow. He professed himself a
radical, but he was a radical in his own sense of the term; and like his
own Sidonia, half foreigner, half looker-on, he felt himself endowed
with an insight only possible to, an outsider, an observer without
inherited prepossessions.
Several contemporary sketches of Disraeli at this time have been
preserved. His dress was purposed affectation; it led the beholder to
look for folly only: and when the brilliant flash came, it was the more
startling as unexpected from such a figure. Lady Dufferin told Mr.
Motley that when she met Disraeli at dinner, he wore a black-velvet coat
lined with satin, purple trousers with a gold band running down the
outside seam, a scarlet waistcoat, long lace ruffles falling down to the
tips of his fingers, white gloves with several rings outside, and long
black ringlets rippling down his shoulders. She told him he had made a
fool of himself by appearing in such a dress, but she did not guess why
it had been adopted. Another contemporary says of him, "When duly
excited, his command of language was wonderful, his power of sarcasm
unsurpassed."
He was busy making speeches and writing political squibs for the next
two years; for Parliament was before his eyes. "He knew," says Froude,
"he had a devil of a tongue, and was unincumbered by the foolish form of
vanity called modesty." 'Ixion in Heaven,' 'The Infernal Marriage,' and
'Popanilla' were attempts to rival both Lucian and Swift on their own
ground. It is doubtful, however, whether he would have risked writing
'Henrietta Temple' (1837) and 'Venetia' (1837), two ardent love stories,
had he not been in debt; for notoriety as a novelist is not always a
recommendation to a constituency.
In 'Henrietta' he found an opportunity to write the biography of a lover
oppressed by duns. It is a most entertaining novel even to a reader who
does not read for a new light on the great statesman, and is remarkable
as the beginning of what is now known as the "natural" manner; a revolt,
his admirers tell us, from the stilted fashion of making love that then
prevailed in novels.
'Venetia' is founded on the characters of Byron and Shelley, and is
amusing reading. The high-flown language incrusted with the gems of
rhetoric excites our risibilities, but it is not safe to laugh at
Disraeli; in his most diverting aspects he has a deep sense of humor,
and he who would mock at him is apt to get a whip across the face at an
unguarded moment. Mr. Disraeli laughs in his sleeve at many things, but
first of all at the reader.
He failed in his canvass for his seat at High Wycombe, but he turned his
failure to good account, and established a reputation for pluck and
influence. "A mighty independent personage," observed Charles Greville,
and his famous quarrel with O'Connell did him so little harm that in
1837 he was returned for Maidstone. His first speech was a failure. The
word had gone out that he was to be put down. At last, finding it
useless to persist, he said he was not surprised at the reception he had
experienced. He had begun several things many times and had succeeded at
last. Then pausing, and looking indignantly across the house, he
exclaimed in a loud and remarkable tone, "I will sit down now, but the
time will come when you will hear me."
He married the widow of his patron, Wyndham Lewis, in 1838. This put him
in possession of a fortune, and gave him the power to continue his
political career. His radicalism was a thing of the past. He had drifted
from Conservatism, with Peel for a leader, to aristocratic socialism;
and in 1844, 1845, and 1847 appeared the Trilogy, as he styled the
novels 'Coningsby,' 'Tancred,' and 'Sibyl.' Of the three, 'Coningsby'
will prove the most entertaining to the modern reader. The hero is a
gentleman, and in this respect is an improvement on Vivian Grey, for his
audacity is tempered by good breeding. The plot is slight, but the
scenes are entertaining. The famous Sidonia, the Jew financier, is a
favorite with the author, and betrays his affection and respect for
race. Lord Monmouth, the wild peer, is a rival of the "Marquis of
Steyne" and worthy of a place in 'Vanity Fair'; the political intriguers
are photographed from life, the pictures of fashionable London tickle
both the vanity and the fancy of the reader.
'Sibyl' is too clearly a novel with a motive to give so much pleasure.
It is a study of the contrasts between the lives of the very rich and
the hopelessly poor, and an attempt to show the superior condition of
the latter when the Catholic Church was all-powerful in England and the
king an absolute monarch.
'Tancred' was composed when Disraeli was under "the illusion of a
possibly regenerated aristocracy." He sends Tancred, the hero, the heir
of a ducal house, to Palestine to find the inspiration to a true
religious belief, and details his adventures with a power of sarcasm
that is seldom equaled. In certain scenes in this novel the author rises
from a mere mocker to a genuine satirist. Tancred's interview with the
bishop, in which he takes that dignitary's religious tenets seriously;
that with Lady Constance, when she explains the "Mystery of Chaos" and
shows how "the stars are formed out of the cream of the Milky Way, a
sort of celestial cheese churned into light" the vision of the angels on
Mt. Sinai, and the celestial Sidonia who talks about the "Sublime and
Solacing Doctrine of Theocratic Equality,"--all these are passages where
we wonder whether the author sneered or blushed when he wrote. Certainly
what has since been known as the Disraelian irony stings as we turn
each page.
Meanwhile Disraeli had become a power in Parliament, and the bitter
opponent of Peel, under whom Catholic emancipation, parliamentary
reform, and the abrogation of the commercial system, had been carried
without conditions and almost without mitigations.
Disraeli's assaults on his leader delighted the Liberals; the country
members felt indignant satisfaction at the deserved chastisement of
their betrayer. With malicious skill, Disraeli touched one after another
the weak points in a character that was superficially vulnerable.
Finally the point before the House became Peel's general conduct. He was
beaten by an overwhelming majority, and to the hand that dethroned him
descended the task of building up the ruins of the Conservative party.
Disraeli's best friends felt this a welcome necessity. There is no
example of a rise so sudden under such conditions. His politics were as
much distrusted as his serious literary passages. But Disraeli was the
single person equal to the task. For the next twenty-five years he led
the Conservative opposition in the House of Commons, varied by short
intervals of power. He was three times Chancellor of the Exchequer,
1853, 1858, and 1859; and on Lord Derby's retirement in 1868 he became
Prime Minister.
In 1870, having laid aside novel-writing for twenty years, he published
'Lothair.' It is a politico-religious romance aimed at the Jesuits, the
Fenians, and the Communists. It had an instantaneous success, for its
author was the most conspicuous figure in Europe, but its popularity is
also due to its own merits. We are all of us snobs after a fashion and
love high society. The glory of entering the splendid portals of the
real English dukes and duchesses seems to be ours when Disraeli throws
open the magic door and ushers the reader in. The decorations do not
seem tawdry, nor the tinsel other than real. We move with pleasurable
excitement with Lothair from palace to castle, and thence to
battle-field and scenes of dark intrigue. The hint of the love affair
with the Olympian Theodora appeals to our romance; the circumventing of
the wily Cardinal and his accomplices is agreeable to the Anglo-Saxon
Protestant mind; their discomfiture, and the crowning of virtue in the
shape of a rescued Lothair married to the English Duke's daughter with
the fixed Church of England views, is what the reader expects and prays
for, and is the last privilege of the real story-teller. That the author
has thrown aside his proclivities for Romanism as he showed them in
'Sibyl,' no more disturbs us than the eccentricities of his politics. We
do not quite give him our faith when he is most in earnest, talking
Semitic Arianism on Mt. Sinai.
A peerage was offered to him in 1868. He refused it for himself, but
asked Queen Victoria to grant the honor to his wife, who became the
Countess of Beaconsfield. But in 1876 he accepted the rank and title of
Earl of Beaconsfield. The author of 'Vivian Grey' received the title
that Burke had refused.
His last novel, 'Endymion,' was written for the £10,000 its publishers
paid for it. It adds nothing to his fame, but is an agreeable picture of
fashionable London life and the struggles of a youth to gain power
and place.
Lord Beaconsfield put more dukes, earls, lords and ladies, more gold and
jewels, more splendor and wealth into his books than any one else ever
tried to do. But beside his Oriental delight in the display of luxury,
it is interesting to see the effect of that Orientalism when he
describes the people from whom he sprang. His rare tenderness and
genuine respect are for those of the race "that is the aristocracy of
nature, the purest race, the chosen people." He sends all his heroes to
Palestine for inspiration; wisdom dwells in her gates. Another
aristocracy, that of talent, he recognizes and applauds. No dullard ever
succeeds, no genius goes unrewarded.
It is the part of the story-teller to make his story a probable one to
the listener, no matter how impossible both character and situation. Mr.
Disraeli was accredited with the faculty of persuading himself to
believe or disbelieve whatever he liked; and did he possess the same
power over his readers, these entertaining volumes would lift him to the
highest rank the novelist attains. As it is, he does not quite succeed
in creating an illusion, and we are conscious of two lobes in the
author's brain; in one sits a sentimentalist, in the other a
mocking devil.
[Illustration: Signature: Isa Carrington Cabell.]