SOCIETY
Macaulay observes of Frances Burney that “while still a girl she had
laid up such a store of materials for fiction as few of those who mix
much in the world are able to accumulate during a long life. She had
watched and listened to people of every class, from princes and great
officers of State, down to artists living in garrets and poets familiar
with subterranean cook-shops. Hundreds of remarkable persons had
passed in review before her--English, French, German, Italian, lords
and fiddlers, deans of cathedrals and managers of theatres, travellers
leading about newly caught savages, and singing women escorted by
deputy husbands.”
This is true of Disraeli. Long before he entered public life, before
he knew the inimitable D’Orsay, or even the luminous Lyndhurst, before
his most happy marriage, he had entered society at both doors--the gate
of horn and the gate of ivory. As a stripling of twenty he had been
sent, as we have seen, by Murray, the founder of his own fortune on
Byron’s fortune and misfortunes, to Abbotsford and Sir Walter Scott.
The young Disraeli used to dub Murray “the Emperor.” Murray described
him as the most remarkable young man he had ever met; “a deep thinker
but thoroughly practical in his ideas,” at once brilliant and solid,
of a bright and airy disposition which endeared him to the young, and,
himself unspoilt as “a child;” singularly happy in his home relations,
and “his father is my oldest friend.” That father was himself a
singular and remarkable man, who had attracted a distinguished
coterie. He was Pye’s early intimate and Thomas Baring’s friend. His
ties with Penn cemented his love of Buckinghamshire. He was familiar
with Southey, and he knew Mrs. Siddons. He conversed with Samuel
Rogers[144] and Tom Moore; he had corresponded and dined with Byron,
of whom “Disraeli the Younger” has recorded some striking traits. He
knew all the men of quills and letters, including the antiquarian
Bliss and Douce, many of the wits, and some of the “wit-woulds.” His
own brother-in-law, George Basevi, was an eminent architect,[145] and
architecture is often touched in the son’s novels.[146] Another member
of the family was a conveyancer, and through him the son was first
sent to read law with a solicitor, in whose office he read Chaucer,
and was then entered at Lincoln’s Inn. He had artistic acquaintances
also. Barry, he knew well. Downman painted his wife, and Downman’s
brother was his associate. And there were also some men of affairs
who visited Isaac Disraeli’s house. The burrowing and irrepressible
Croker, afterwards so mercilessly satirised as “Rigby,”[147] and
equally trounced, poor man, by Thackeray and Macaulay, seems to have
been his occasional purveyor of politics. But for contemporary parties
he cared little. He was a solitary student of the past; excavating
ancient manuscripts in the British Museum when the daily number of
such scholars did not exceed six. He was shy, meditative, dreamy, and
dispassionate. But he was poet besides recluse; his earliest courtship,
while Dr. Johnson lay dying, had been that of the muse. Sir Walter
Scott included one of his lyrics in a published collection.[148]
He diversified his stern by lighter labours, and his novels, long
since moldered, caused some stir and attracted sympathy. After the
romance of his early failures and the surprise of his early success,
he set himself patiently down to work for ten years before he would
print another line. His own father, who never understood but always
humored him, was a man of business, sanguine and prompt, yet gay and
nonchalant, who lost fortunes and regained them.[149] Disraeli the
Younger united the two strains of his father and of his grandfather. He
was a practical dreamer.
Isaac Disraeli, then, gave his boy an opening to the literary world.
Among his intimates was the shrewd solicitor, Mr. Austin, and his
clever young wife, a literary coquette of talent, the aunt of the
future Sir Henry Layard, the transcriber of _Vivian Grey_. Her salon
was frequented, among others, by the Hooks[150] and the Mathews.
With the Austins young Disraeli journeyed in Italy and Germany. From
his father’s library he thus emerged on a larger world. But he soon
outstepped its bounds. After his long Eastern travels with Clay, and
Meredith[151] affianced to Disraeli’s sister--a voyage on which Byron’s
Tita became Disraeli’s valet, and on which he encountered the most
opposite types as well as some curious adventures[152]--his own first
books made him the lion of several seasons. He and Bulwer divided the
honors of Bath, then still fashionable. Lyndhurst grew to depend on his
assistance, and even advice; Disraeli escorted him when as Chancellor
he was present at Kensington at the accession of Queen Victoria;
Lyndhurst’s daughter became an associate of Disraeli’s sister; and
nothing gave Disraeli more unfeigned pleasure than the visits of
Lyndhurst and Bulwer to his father at Bradenham.
He not only wrote novels, pamphlets, and sonnets (his vain ambition
was to revolutionise poetry), but he seems to have contributed to
the _Edinburgh Review_ as well as to many magazines. In 1833, as has
been noticed, he corresponded with its editor, Napier, with a view
to a “slasher” on Morier’s “Zohrab,” which had been puffed in the
_Quarterly_. Of the book he remarks, “A production in every respect
more contemptible I have seldom met with;” and of the puff, “This is
what comes of putting a tenth-rate novelist at the head of a great
critical journal.”[153]
Then followed Gore House, with its high Bohemian wits, its low
Bohemian buffoons, its loose celebrities, its “man of destiny,” Louis
Napoleon; its laughter and its tears; its Watteau-like _parterres_,
and the generous, erring Egeria of the grot.[154] Then, too, came that
fascinating circle of the Sheridans, which united sparkling talent
to entrancing beauty in extraordinary charm. But then also came the
duller round of High Mayfair--the Londonderrys and the Buckinghams.
Among diplomatists at this period he knew Pozzo. He had seen, or met,
or known the fathers or grandfathers of most of the aristocracy which,
forty years afterwards, he was to lead. Resolved from the first, as
he said in an early letter, “to respect himself, the only way to make
others respect you;” an outrageous dandy; sometimes in deplored debt,
often in surmounted scrapes, always in good humour, he had surveyed the
whole kaleidoscope of society, artificial as well as natural, before,
or soon after, he turned thirty years of age; from the pachas and
intriguers of the East, to the leaders and amusers of the West; from
Ali and the governors, admirals, and garrisons of Malta and Gibraltar,
to solemn busy-bodies in and out of place; the fops and flutterers in
and out of society; men famous who were destined to obscurity, men
obscure who were vowed to fame; eccentrics and platitudinarians; the
Upper Ten--“the two thousand Brahmins who constitute the world”--and
the lower ten thousand; from the eccentric Urquhart to “L. E. L.,” “the
Sappho of Brompton,” and, it would seem, Davison the future musical
critic. An early letter, probably addressed to him, lies before me. It
may be of passing interest to subjoin it:--
“MY DEAR DAVISON,
“I am very vexed that I missed you this morning. I arrived in town
to-day, and am now living the _vie solitaire_ in Bloomsbury. Will
you come and ameliorate a bachelor’s torments by partaking of his
goblet?
“I am alone, as Ossian says, but luckily not upon the hill of
storms.
“Instead of that catch-cold situation, a good fireside will greet
you.
“Mind you come.
“Yours ever,
“B. DISRAELI.”
“Excuse scrawl, etc. 6 o’clock.”
The society of those days still retained much of the Regency’s tinsel.
It glittered far more than it shone. Society was not then quite
the Dresden china shop with porcelain figures of beaux and boxers,
of topers and bull-dogs, of satyrs and nymphs, of city swains and
simpering shepherdesses, that it had been ten or fifteen years before.
Byron, with his savage sincerity, may be said to have dashed that
smooth farrago to fragments. But it remained a society of veneer and
affectation. It was a less natural age than our own, with fewer ideals
and less outward movement. It was a more boisterous age than our own;
public opinion exercised far less pressure. It was at once a coarser,
a more sentimental and a more romantic, if a more bombastic age than
ours. There still lingered the curiosity of Dr. Johnson’s age for the
tittle-tattle of voyagers and the curiosities of barbarism. But it was
not in the main a more material age, or, under the surface, a much
more selfish one. Sympathy was local then. “The people were only half
born.” It was, however, certainly a generation far more fastidious and
exclusive; and at the same time it was certainly more appreciative
of genius. You could then appeal to the few where you cannot now
appeal to the many; for the few then had neither the narrowness of the
_bourgeoisie_ nor the unlimited appetite of the million.
“The invention,” smiles Disraeli so early as in his mock-classical
squib, _The Infernal Marriage_, “by Jupiter of an aristocratic
immortality, as a reward for a well-spent life on earth, appears to
me to have been a very ingenious idea. It really is a reward very
stimulative of good conduct before we shuffle off this mortal coil, and
remarkably contrasts with the democracy of the damned. The Elysians,
with a splendid climate, a teeming soil, and a nation made on purpose
to wait upon them, of course enjoyed themselves very much.... The
Elysians, indeed, being highly refined and gifted ... were naturally a
very liberal-minded race and very capable of appreciating every kind of
excellence. If a gnome, or a sylph, therefore, in any way distinguished
themselves, ... aye! indeed, if the poor devils could do nothing better
than write a poem or a novel, they were sure to be noticed by the
Elysians, who always bowed to them as they passed by, and sometimes,
indeed, even admitted them into their circles.”
What Disraeli detested was what he termed, even in _Vivian Grey_,
“_society on anti-social principles_.” What he liked was a distinct
and distinctive circle, interchanging its ideas--“free trade in
conversation.” In his social, as in his political outlook, he
craved inclusiveness on the basis of excellence, and not either the
restrictedness of a caste or the miscellany of a multitude. In this
sense all society should be “aristocratic.” And he always felt that, as
a rule, it was precisely the middle-class element, contrasted either
with those who inherited the finer perceptions of breeding or with
those--the gallery--born with perceptive instincts--that is in the main
deficient in these respects. “... The stockbrokers’ ladies took off the
quarto travels and the hot-pressed poetry. They were the patronesses of
your patent ink and your wire-wove paper. That is all past....”[155]
What he disrelished was the meaner sort of mediocrity, except when it
was unassuming and useful.
“High breeding and a good heart,” he demands in _Lothair_ for the
“perfect host.” “To throw over a host,” he has also written, “is the
most heinous of social crimes. It ought never to be pardoned....”
“... She, too,” he says of the Duchess in _Coningsby_--who “was one
of the delights of existence,”--“was distinguished by that perfect
good breeding which is the result of nature and not of education; for
it may be found in a cottage and may be missed in a palace. ’Tis a
genial regard for the feelings of others that springs from the absence
of selfishness.... Nothing in the world could have induced her to
appear bored when another was addressing or attempting to amuse her.
She was not one of those vulgar fine ladies who meet you one day with
a vacant stare, as if unconscious of your existence, and address
you on another in a tone of impertinent familiarity.” “This is a
lesson for you fine ladies,” says “Egremont” in _Sybil_, “who think
you can govern the world by what you call your social influences;
asking people once or twice a year to an inconvenient crowd in your
house; now haughtily smirking, and now impertinently staring at them,
and flattering yourselves all this time that to have the occasional
privilege of entering your saloons, and the periodical experience of
your insolent recognition, is to be a reward for great exertions, or,
if necessary, an inducement to infamous tergiversation.” And, indeed,
the “Zenobia” of _Endymion_, who was Lady Jersey, did sometimes
condescend to practise these shifts of political ambition.[156] But
in high society with low standards, there were worse depths than the
backstairs patronage of party recruits. “Never,” as the fine sentence
prefixed to _Sybil_ recalls, “were so many gentlemen, and so little
gentleness.” The contemptuous materialism of “Monmouth House,” the
elegant indifference of “Lord Eskdale,” around which revolve the
satellites and parasites, social and political--the folks that made
Selwyn exclaim when a great nobleman’s golden dinner-service was up to
auction--“Lord, how many toads have eaten off this plate!”
“Among the habitual dwellers” (this from _Coningsby_) “in these
delicate halls there was a tacit understanding, a prevalent doctrine,
that required no formal exposition, no proofs and illustrations,
no comment, and no gloss, which was, indeed, rather a traditional
conviction than an impartial dogma--that the exoteric public were,
on many subjects, the victims of very vulgar prejudice, which these
enlightened personages wished neither to disturb nor to adopt.”
“Society,” he said, alluding to its treatment of Byron in _Venetia_,
“is all passions and no heart.” In _Vivian Grey_ (as to the
circumstances of which I shall say something in my last chapter) the
father (that is, Disraeli’s father) thus admonishes the boyish son.
“... You are now inspecting one of the worst portions of society in
what is called the great world (St. Giles’ is bad, but of another
kind), and it may be useful, on the principle that the actual sight
of brutal ebriety was supposed to have inspired youth with the virtue
of temperance.... Let me warn you not to fall into the usual error
of youth, in fancying that the circle you move in is precisely the
world itself. Do not imagine that there are not other beings, whose
benevolent principle is governed by finer sympathies, and by those
nobler emotions which really constitute all our public and private
virtues. I give you this hint, lest, in your present society, you might
suppose these virtues were merely historical.” Speaking of “Vivian
Grey” under the guise of “Contarini Fleming’s” first novel, Disraeli
makes his hero ejaculate: “All the bitterness of my heart, occasioned
by my wretched existence among their false circles, found its full
vent. Never was anything so imprudent. Everybody figured, and all
parties and opinions alike suffered.” Still more did he despise “the
insolence of the insignificant.”
What he admired in whatever form--even when incompatible with
society--was purpose with personality. This is manifest in all his
early novels, conspicuous in his later ones. The two heroes of
_Venetia_--Byron and Shelley[157]--are portrayed from this point
of view. Even the hysterical purpose of Lady Caroline Lamb in the
person of “Lady Monteagle” is recognised; and of Byron he causes his
characters to speak in _Vivian Grey_: “There was the man! And that
such a man should be lost to us at the very moment that he had begun
to discover why it had pleased the Omnipotent to have endowed him
with such powers!”--“If one thing were more characteristic of Byron’s
mind than another, it was his strong, shrewd common sense, his pure,
unadulterated sagacity.”--“The loss of Byron can never be retrieved.
He was indeed a real man; and, when I say this, I award him the most
splendid character which human nature need aspire to.”[158] The very
intellectual purpose of comparative purposelessness, of dilettante
taste, attracted him. This is how he addresses “Luttrell” in _The Young
Duke_: “... Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is
not magnificence, and that splendour is not heart. Teach us that taste
is a talisman which can do greater wonders than the millions of the
loan-monger. Teach us that to vie is not to rival; and to imitate not
to invent. Teach us that pretension is a bore. Teach us that wit is
excessively good-natured, and, like champagne, not only sparkles, but
is sweet.[159] Teach us the vulgarity of malignity. Teach us that envy
spoils our complexions, and that anxiety destroys our figure. Catch the
fleeting colours of that sly chameleon, Cant, and show what excessive
trouble we are ever taking to make ourselves miserable and silly. Teach
us all this, and Aglaia shall stop a crow in its course, and present
you with a pen, Thalia hold the golden fluid in a Sévres vase, and
Euphrosyne support the violet-coloured scroll.”
So, too, the energetic personality of D’Orsay aroused his enthusiastic
friendship, and drew from him, some twenty years after that ambrosial
figure had vanished, the tribute of “... the most accomplished and the
most engaging character that has figured in this century, who, with
the form and universal genius of an Alcibiades, combined a brilliant
wit and a heart of quick affection, and who, placed in a public
position, would have displayed a courage, a judgment, and a commanding
intelligence which would have ranked him among the leaders of mankind.”
D’Orsay speaks and acts to the life as “Count Mirabel” in _The Young
Duke_. And, in a too unfamiliar passage of _The Young Duke_, he thus
also embalms, I fancy,[160] the memory of Lady Blessington’s maligned
charm under the veil of “Lady Aphrodite.”
“... We are not of those who set themselves against the verdict of
society, or ever omit to expedite, by a gentle kick, a falling friend.
And yet, when we just remember beauty is beauty, and grace is grace,
and kindness is kindness, although the beautiful, the graceful, and the
amiable do get in a scrape, we don’t know how it is, we confess it is a
weakness, but, under these circumstances, we do not feel quite inclined
to sneer. But this is wrong. We should not pity or pardon those who
have yielded to great temptation, or, perchance, great provocation.
Besides, it is right that our sympathies should be kept for the
injured.” Endeavour and individuality he reverenced and recognised.
Tact, the charity of manners, he admired.[161] But for aimlessness,
whether callous or random, whether patrician or plebeian--whether of
“Lord Marney,” who said to “Egremont,” “I am your elder brother, sir,
whose relationship to you is your only claim to the consideration of
society,” and was answered, “A curse on the society that has fashioned
such claims ... founded on selfishness, cruelty, and fraud, and leading
to demoralisation, misery, and crime;” or of “Rigby,” who called his
record in Debrett of the marriage successfully schemed for his patron,
“a great fact.” To such as these he gave no quarter; and he scalped
them with a wit and an irony that has rarely been equalled.
And he loved startling contrasts. “Whatever they did,” he says in _The
Infernal Marriage_, “the Elysians were careful never to be vehement.”
Disraeli liked to break the monotone of society’s polished surface
by pronounced and original types of race, of class, of passion, of
enterprise; the Roman among the European-Americans, the Arabian,
the Syrian, the Greek, the Gaul among the Franks. He revelled in
romantic women, muses, or prophetesses, who lead forlorn movements,
or rally broken fortunes; in men whom they cheer and kindle; in
public spirits; in sudden and unexpected revolutions of fortune,
and sudden and unforeseen revelations of character. To himself in
his first youth might adhere the phrase with which he then labelled
“Popanilla:” “He looked the most dandified of savages, and the most
savage of dandies.” He liked to pit the Bohemian against the noble,
and the valet against the hero; the “light children of dance and song”
against their heavy patrons; to display the power of career even in the
lodginghouse-keeper’s daughter; to depict the aristocracy of the master
working man; to analyse and contrast the ironies of the struggle, the
social tragedy of illusion, and the social farce of fashion. “...
‘Your mind is opening, Ixion,’” says Mercury, in that brilliant skit
which Disraeli penned before he was celebrated; “‘you will soon be
a man of the world. To the left, and keep clear of that star’--‘Who
lives there?’--‘The Fates know, not I. Some low people who are trying
to shine into notice. ’Tis a parvenu planet, and only sprung up into
space within this century. We don’t visit them.’” “Sybil” herself, it
should be remembered, is an aristocrat born, but not bred, while half
“Egremont’s” Norman relations are cads or snobs.
He loved, too, society’s foibles--to hit off the precocious wiseacres
of the golden youth. “... A young fellow of two- or three-and-twenty
knows the world as men used to do after as many years of scrapes. I
wonder whether there is such a thing as a greenhorn? Effie Crabbs
says the reason he gives up his house is that he has cleaned out the
old generation, and that the new generation would clean him.”[162] To
banter “those uncommonly able men who only want an opportunity,” the
philosophers and the puppies; to jest, as he does in _Popanilla_, at
legal fictions; to poke fun at the “great orator, before a green table,
beating a red box,” or the prattlers on science in “gilded saloons;” to
depict the pyramidal selfishness but unruffled pride of Lord Hertford
in “Lord Monmouth”--Thackeray’s “Lord Steyne;” to chronicle the pæan
of “Mrs. Guy Flouncey”--a precursor of “Becky Sharp”--when she wins
the invitation to the great house: “My dear, we have done it at last!”
or those whose _summum bonum_ is to have ten thousand a year and be
thought to have five; or those waiters on dying Mammon, who, when the
will is read, “all become orderly and broken-hearted;” or the bored
good humour of the Radical noble, who was almost a Communist except as
regarded land--“as if a fellow could have too much land;” to burlesque
the whole medley of blue bores and bore-blues, of red-tape, and
peas-on-drums, the Jacks-in-office and the Jacks-in-boxes, of “nobs and
snobs,” of “statesmen, fiddlers, and buffoons.” But it should not be
forgotten that he ever kept a warm place in his heart for sailors, whom
he regarded as among the most natural and delightful of mankind.[163]
It was not only the big shams and little follies of society that
revolted or amused him. He held, also, that melancholy and dulness were
social crimes. “If a man be gloomy, let him keep to himself. No man has
a right to go croaking about society, or, what is worse, looking as if
he stifled grief. These fellows should be put in the pound. We like a
good broken heart or so now and then; but then one should retire to the
Sierra Morena mountains and live upon locusts and wild honey, not dine
out with our cracked cores....”[164] And among breaches of social tact,
he most disliked those minor monomanias which make the bore. “Never,”
he once warned a young man, “discuss ‘The Letters of Junius,’ or ‘The
Man in the Iron Mask.’” Some of his happiest conversations are to be
found in the _Lothair_ colloquies at Muriel Towers.
Society used to depend on conversation much more than it does now, when
there is so much hurry, so much wealth, so many amusements, so little
privacy, and so much printed about it that practically there is no
compact society at all--merely a touring menagerie. Disraeli, in one of
his earlier novels,[165] has an excellent essay in miniature on social
conversation:--
“The high style of conversation where eloquence and philosophy emulate
each other, ... all this has ceased. It ceased in this country
with Johnson and Burke, and it requires a Johnson and a Burke for
its maintenance. There is no mediocrity in such intercourse, no
intermediate character between the sage and the bore. The second style,
where men, not things, are the staple, but where wit and refinement and
sensibility invest even personal details with intellectual interest,
does flourish at present, as it always must in a highly civilised
society.... Then comes your conversation man, who, we confess, is
our aversion. His talk is a thing apart, got up before he enters the
company from whose conduct it should grow out. He sits in the middle of
a large table, and, with a brazen voice, bawls out his anecdotes about
Sir Thomas or Sir Humphry, Lord Blank or Lady Blue. He is incessant,
yet not interesting; ever varying, yet always monotonous. Even if we
are amused, we are no more grateful for the entertainment than we are
to the lamp over the table for the light which it universally sheds,
and to yield which it was obtained on purpose. _We are more gratified
by the slight conversation of one who is often silent, but who speaks
from his momentary feelings, than by all this hullabaloo._ Yet this
machine is generally a favourite piece of furniture with the hostess.
You may catch her eye, as he recounts some adventure of the morning,
which proves that he not only belongs to every club, but goes to them,
light up with approbation; and then when the ladies withdraw, and the
female senate deliver their criticism on the late actors, she will
observe with a gratified smile to her _confidante_, that the dinner
went off well, and that Mr. Bellow was very strong to-day. All this is
horrid, and the whole affair is a delusion. A variety of people are
brought together, who all come as late as possible, and retire as soon,
merely to show that they have other engagements. A dinner is prepared
for them, which is hurried over, in order that a certain number of
dishes should be--not tasted, but seen. And provided that there is no
moment that an absolute silence reigns; that, besides the bustling of
the servants, the clattering of the plates and knives, a stray anecdote
is told, which, if good, has been heard before, and which, if new, is
generally flat; provided a certain number of certain names of people
of consideration are introduced, by which some stranger, for whom the
party is often secretly given, may learn the scale of civilisation
of which he this moment forms a part; provided the senators do not
steal out too soon to the House, and their wives to another party--the
hostess is congratulated on the success of her entertainment.” He much
preferred the conversation of “Pinto,” whose raillery, unremembered,
amused and “flattered the self-love of those whom it seemed sportively
not to spare.... He was not an intellectual Crœsus, but his pockets
were full of sixpences.” But then, “Pinto” did not quite belong to
the lower social stratum above characterised. That Disraeli had not
altered his opinion of it after forty years’ immense and intimate
experience is shown by the description in _Lothair_ of the “reception”
of “Mrs. Putney Giles.” Not that Disraeli by any means inclined to the
“call-a-spade-a-spade” view of conversation. To say all one thought,
to be rudely frank, would destroy social converse. “... As Pinto says,
if every man were straightforward in his opinions, there would be no
conversation. The fun of talk is to find out what a man really thinks,
and then contrast it with the enormous lies he has been telling all
dinner, and perhaps all his life.” “Never argue,” he once wrote, “and,
if controversy arises, change the subject.” And he also recognised that
“talk to man about himself, and he will listen for hours.” “All women
are vain, some men are not.” He believed, too, in the saying of Swift,
that a community of ailments is a fastener of friendship. Once when an
intimate asked Lord Beaconsfield what he did when his acquaintanceship
was claimed by many whose faces and names were unfamiliar, but who
professed to have known him in youth, he answered, “I always say one
thing--‘Quite so, quite so! _and how is the old complaint?_’”
I have said that in his youth Disraeli had occasionally been in
debt.[166] No one ever reprobated it more, though no one, except
Goldsmith and Sheridan, has also extracted more humour out of it, as is
attested by the episode of “Mr. Levison” and the coals in _Henrietta
Temple_.[167] In this novel he thus moralises--
“If youth but knew the fatal misery that they are entailing on
themselves the moment they accept a pecuniary credit to which they
are not entitled, how they would start in their career! how pale they
would turn! how they would tremble, and clasp their hands in agony
at the precipice on which they are disporting. Debt is the prolific
mother of folly and of crime; it taints the course of life in all its
dreams. Hence so many unhappy marriages, so many prostituted pens and
venal politicians. It hath a small beginning, but a giant’s growth and
strength. When we make the monster we make our master, who haunts us at
all hours, and shakes his whip of scorpions forever in our sight. The
slave hath no overseer so severe. Faustus, when he signed the bond with
blood, did not secure a dream more terrific. But when we are young we
must enjoy ourselves. True; and there are few things more gloomy than
the recollection of a youth that has not been enjoyed....”
He was never a gambler. One of the most striking passages of _Vivian
Grey_ gives the story--which would make a strong play--of a man in high
place, led on by even noble motives to game, until he sharped at play,
and was rescued from disgrace by friendship; and in _The Young Duke_
is the thrilling romance of the career of the founder of Crockford’s.
The Macaronis were replaced by the Beaux; the Beaux in their turn by
the more florid Dandies; until, at last, in the ’seventies, appeared
the “Swells,” the heavy, if grand, Blunderbores, sworn to bachelor
indulgence, who thought that “every woman should marry, but no man,”
the exception only being if a girl sprang from “an affectionate family,
with good shooting and first-rate claret.” Disraeli was interested
in the “swells.” In a measure he had created them, because he had
reconciled the people to the nobles, and the “swell” was a term
embodying the people’s homage. But in this phase Disraeli saw something
comic and barbaric. “St. Aldegonde,” himself a gigantic “swell,” could
not bear the “swells.” When he met them he described them as “a social
jungle in which there was a great herd of animals.”
And with the “swells” began something of that “free-and-easiness”
which hails from modern Columbia, and has now leavened society with
its licence and its slang. “Free-and-easiness is all very well,” once
laughed Disraeli to a friend, “but why not be a little freer and a
little less easy?” “His spirit,” he says of “Coningsby,” “recoiled from
that gross familiarity that is the characteristic of modern manners,
and which would destroy all forms and ceremonies, merely because
they curb and control their own coarse convenience and ill-disguised
selfishness.” With the “swells” came also another social change--the
diffusion not only of wealth, but of taste. A great lady assures
“Lothair” that he will be surprised to see so many well-dressed and
good-looking people at the opera, that he never beheld before.
Political society pervades all Disraeli’s novels. Only two phases of
it need here be mentioned. The tiny coteries who dine together twice
a week and “think themselves a party.” They appear in _Sybil_; they
reappear in _Endymion_. And the breakfast gatherings of the ’forties,
peculiar, as Disraeli noted, to Liberals. “It shows a restless,
revolutionary mind,” mocks “Lady Firebrace,” “that can settle to
nothing, but must be running after gossip the moment they are awake.”
But two sayings, not directly with regard to society, may in this
connection, however, be recorded. Both are from _The Young Duke_. “...
He was always offended and always offending. Such a man could never
succeed as a politician--a character who, of all others, must learn
to endure, to forget, and to forgive.” The second was prophetic: “One
thing is clear--that a man may speak very well in the House of Commons
and fail very completely in the House of Lords. There are two distinct
styles requisite. I intend in the course of my career, if I have time,
to give a specimen of both. In the Lower House, ‘Don Juan’ may perhaps
be our model; in the Upper House, ‘Paradise Lost.’”
As for club existence, the “lounging, languid men who spend their time
in crossing from Brooks’s to Boodle’s and from Boodle’s to Brooks’s,”
has he not characterised “those middle-aged nameless gentlemen of
easy circumstances, who haunt clubs and dine a great deal at each
others’ houses and chambers; men who travel regularly a little, and
gossip regularly a great deal; who lead a sort of facile, slipshod
existence, doing nothing, yet mightily interested in what others do;
_great critics of little things_ ... peering through the window of a
club-house as if they were discovering a planet”? And as for civic
hospitality, he sums it up best, perhaps, in the _Endymion_ epigram:
“Turtle makes all men equal.”
He felt all along that, after all, true society is at home, and not
with “polished ruffians;” the “courtesy of the heart” was preferable
to that “of the head.” “My idea of perfect society,” says “Lothair,”
“is being married, as I propose, and paying visits to Brentham;” or, as
Disraeli varies the theme in the same novel, “I am fond of society that
pleases me, that is accomplished and natural and ingenious; otherwise I
prefer being alone.” Home, he thought, should be the centre of society,
and a homeless society was not one at all. It is very noticeable, in
comparing present with past fiction, how the English sense of home and
flicker of the fireside, which used to warm every page, has receded
out of view before the motor-speed and nervous restlessness of the
age. His home-fondness was touchingly displayed after the death of his
wife by his reply to a friend, who asked if he were driving home--a
reply accompanied by tears; “Home! I have no home _now_.” Nor did any
great man ever reserve the sanctities of the hearth more completely
from a prying public. The purity of his home affections was one of Mr.
Gladstone’s notes of eulogy in the funeral oration that he delivered
in the House to which Disraeli had been proudly devoted for forty-five
long years. There are scores of sayings and episodes in his books, from
_Vivian Grey_ downwards, regarding the home affections; many charming
touches, too, in his letters to his sister. But I content myself with
one, from _Venetia_--
“... After all, we have no friends that we can depend upon in this life
but our parents.... All other intimacies, however ardent, are liable
to cool; all other confidence, however limited, to be violated. In
the phantasmagoria of life, the friend with whom we have cultivated
mutual trust for years is often suddenly or gradually estranged from
us, or becomes, from painful yet irresistible circumstances, even
our deadliest foe. As for women ... the mistresses of our hearts,
who has not learnt that the links of passion are fragile as they are
glittering?... Where is the enamoured face that smiled upon our early
love, and was to shed tears over our grave?... No wonder we grow
callous, for how few have the opportunity of returning to the hearth
which they quitted in levity or thoughtless weariness, yet which alone
is faithful to them; whose sweet affections require not the stimulus
of prosperity or fame, the lure of accomplishments or the tribute of
flattery, but which are constant to us in distress, and console us even
in disgrace!”
I ought, perhaps, to add a word of Disraeli’s ideas on love and
marriage. No one set more store by, or laid more store on, the deciding
influence of woman on man’s career. No one recognised more heartily a
woman’s instinctive superiority to logic. How good is the humour in
that dressing-room scene of the ’seventies in _Lothair_:--
“... The gentlemen of the smoking-room have it not all their own way
quite as much as they think. If, indeed, a new school of Athens were
to be pictured, the sages and the students might be represented in
exquisite dressing-gowns, with slippers rarer than the lost one of
Cinderella, and brandishing beautiful brushes over tresses still more
fair. Then is the time when characters are never more finely drawn, or
difficult social questions more accurately solved; knowledge without
reasoning, and truth without logic--the triumph of intuition! But we
must not profane the mysteries of Bona Dea.”
To women, moreover, he, like “Coningsby,” “instinctively bowed as
to beings set apart for reverence and delicate treatment,” but
disillusions chequered his experience. In maturity he could undoubtedly
“conceive that there were any other women in the world than fair
Geraldines and Countesses of Pembroke.” While Lord Randolph Churchill
was still alive, a young man--now an eminent Liberal statesman, and
then in the thick of a passionate courtship--poured out his heart to
him as they walked home together from the House. Lord Randolph reminded
him of what Disraeli had once observed to himself, that two of the
great elements in life were passion and power; that in youth the first
prevailed, but that, as years proceeded, the last proved incomparable.
He once said in his early youth that most of the distinguished men
of his acquaintance who had married “for love” bullied or maltreated
their wives; and he also remarked at an early period that the man who
wishes to rule mankind must not marry a too beautiful wife, who would
divide his time and his will. Long afterwards, in the devotion of his
home, Mrs. Disraeli would rally him by saying, “You know you married
me for money, and I know that now, if you had to do it again, you
would marry me for love.” It will be recalled, too, that “Sidonia,”
though he had a heart, indulged his deeper emotions more towards
causes than individuals. “In his organisation there was a peculiarity,
perhaps a great deficiency.” And yet Disraeli wrote: “We know not how
it is, but love at first sight is a subject of constant ridicule, but
somehow we suspect that it has more to do with the affairs of this
world than the world is willing to own.”--“Where we do not respect, we
soon cease to love; when we cease to love, virtue weeps and flies.”
I think that real love as the base of marriage is more genuinely, as
well as romantically, portrayed in _Venetia_ that in any of his works.
In those pages it really moves us instead of moving before us, as it
often does, even in the “love story” of _Henrietta Temple_. One of his
early hobbies, too, was that men ought to marry early, as a source of
strength and simplicity both to the affections and to the race. This
is emphasised in _Contarini Fleming_. The passage is striking, and
illustrates his deeper ideas on the whole subject: “To a man who is in
love the thought of another woman is uninteresting, if not repulsive.
Constancy is human nature. Instead of love being the occasion of all
the misery of this world, as is sung by fantastic bards, _I believe
that the misery of this world is occasioned by there not being love
enough_.... Happiness is only to be found in a recurrence to the
principles of human nature, and these will prompt very simple manners.
For myself, I believe that permanent unions of the sexes should be
early encouraged; nor do I conceive that general happiness can ever
flourish but in societies where it is the custom for all males to
marry at eighteen. This custom, I am informed, is not unusual in the
United States of America, and its consequence is a simplicity of
manners and purity of conduct _which Europeans cannot comprehend, but
to which they must ultimately have recourse_. Primeval barbarism and
extreme civilisation must arrive at the same results. Men under these
circumstances are actuated by their structure; in the first instance
instinctively, in the second philosophically. At present[168] we are
all in the various gradations of the intermediate state of corruption.”
At all events, his own compositions were conspicuously spotless; and
it may be said of him, as it was of Addison--so unlike otherwise--“No
whiter page remains.”
Such, then, are some of Disraeli’s main ideas on the outward forms and
inward spirit of society. Fashionable “society” he played with, and
he used--it amused him; but he never cherished, rather he scorned it.
Power he valued; and fame--“the opinion of mankind after death”--for
him meant power. There was once a certain rather fussy Radical member
who had long been anxious to make his acquaintance. When _Lothair_
appeared, he rushed up to Disraeli excitedly, with many apologies
for the intrusion, and begged him to receive the assurance of his
daughter’s intense admiration for that work. “Thank you ever so much,”
returned Disraeli, “_and this is fame_!”
When the gorgeous trinket was in his grasp, and he was at the zenith
of his eminence, I have already recorded an impressive instance. I may
contrast with this another picture, also of a fact already chronicled
in the interesting recollections of a young associate of his old age.
It will bear repetition. The scene was Hughenden in late autumn, the
time, after Lady Beaconsfield’s death. He sat in reverie before the
fire, watching the flickering embers. “Dreams, dreams, dreams,” he
murmured, as the wreaths of smoke and the sparks of flame went upwards.
He was thinking of his favourite Sheridans, by whose own fireside, and
basking in whose sunshine of wit and beauty, so many of his happiest
evenings had been spent forty years agone. And perhaps, also, he was
thinking of that charming daughter of Lord Lyndhurst, whose pet name
tallied with his own sister’s; and possibly, too, of that little
Frances Braham, whom he had known in girlhood, and whom, after she,
too, had carved a career, he still knew and admired as Frances, Lady
Waldegrave.
Yet one more dissolving view--
The scene shifts again to London and a Foreign Office reception, with
its gaping throng. It was the last function that Lady Beaconsfield,
frail with age and bent with rheumatism, was able to attend. Step by
step, all the way down that long staircase, he himself planted her
feet and tenderly supported her feeble frame, till, when she reached
the end, he presented to her a youth of promise, since a member of
ministries, who will still remember it.
Yes, it was companionship, not “society,” that was precious to him. And
trial proves friendship.
“‘Since I last met you, I heard you had seen much and suffered
much.’--‘And that makes the kind thoughts of friends more
precious.’--‘You have, however, a great many things which ought to make
you happy.’--‘I do not deserve to be happy, for I have made so many
mistakes....’--‘Take a brighter and a nobler view of your life.... Feel
rather that you have been tried and not found wanting.’”
[Illustration: DISRAELI IN 1852
_After a painting by Sir Francis Grant, P.R.A._]