Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, who had a Roman firmness, was absolutely determined that her son should not marry "a penniless girl whose education had been so flagrantly neglected, who was vain and flighty, with a mocking humour and a conspicuous lack of principle." At this point the story becomes exceedingly interesting. A Balzac would strip it of its romantic trappings, and would penetrate into its physiology. Out of Rosina's sight, and diverted by the excess of his literary labours, Edward's infatuation began to decline. His mother, whose power of character would have been really formidable if it had been enforced by sympathy or even by tact, relaxed her opposition; and instantly her son, himself, no longer attacked, became calmer and more clear-sighted. Rosina's faults were patent to his memory; the magic of her beauty less invincible. Within a month all was changed again. Rosina fretted herself into what she contrived to have reported to Bulwer-Lytton as an illness. She begged for an interview, and he went with reluctance to bid her farewell for ever. It was Bulwer-Lytton's habit to take with him a masterpiece of literature upon every journey. It seems unfortunate that on this occasion The Tempest was not his companion, for it might have warned him, as Prospero warned Ferdinand, against the fever in the blood:—

"No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall To make this contract grow; but barren hate, Sour-eyed disdain, and discord, shall bestrew The union of your bed, with weeds so loathly That you shall hate it, both."

When his short interview, which was to have been a final one, was over, that had happened which made a speedy marriage necessary, whatever the consequences might be.

The new conditions were clearly stated to old Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, but that formidable lady belonged to an earlier generation, and saw no reason for Quixotic behaviour. Her conscience had been trained in the eighteenth century, and all her blame was for Rosina Wheeler. Torn between his duty and his filial affection, Bulwer-Lytton now passed through a period of moral agony. He wrote to his mother: "I am far too wretched, and have had too severe a contest with myself, not to look to the future rather with despondency than pleasure, and the view you take of the matter is quite enough to embitter my peace of mind." Miss Wheeler, not unnaturally stung to anger, used disrespectful expressions regarding Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, and these bickerings filled the lover and son with indignation. His life, between these ladies, grew to be hardly worth living, and in the midst of one such crisis this brilliant young dandy of four-and-twenty wrote:—"I feel more broken-hearted, despondent, and sated than any old valetudinarian who has seen all his old hopes and friends drop off one by one, and finds himself left for the rest of his existence to the solitary possession of gloom and gout." Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton fought fiercely to the last, and Edward determined to close the matter; on August 29th, 1827, he married Rosina.

At first, in spite of, and even because of, the wild hostility of his mother, the marriage seemed successful. The rage of the mother drove the husband to the wife. Lord Lytton has noted that in later years all that his grandfather and his grandmother said about one another was unconsciously biassed by their memory of later complications. Neither Bulwer-Lytton nor Rosina could give an accurate history of their relations at the beginning, because the mind of each was prejudiced by their knowledge of the end. Each sought to justify the hatred which both had lived to feel, by representing the other as hateful from the first. But the letters survive, and the recollections of friends, to prove that this was entirely untrue. It must be admitted that their union was never based upon esteem, but wholly upon passion, and that from the first they lacked that coherency of relation, in moral respects, which was needed to fix their affections. But those who have dimly heard how bitterly these two unfortunate people hated one another in later life will be astonished to learn that they spent the two first years together like infatuated turtle-doves.

Their existence was romantic and absurd. Cut off from all support by the implacable anger of old Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, they depended on a combined income of L380 a year and whatever the husband could make to increase it. Accordingly they took a huge country house, Woodcot in Oxon, and lived at the rate of several thousands a year. There they basked in an affluent splendour of bad taste which reminds us of nothing in the world so much as of those portions of The Lady Flabella which Mrs. Wititterly was presently to find so soft and so voluptuous. The following extract from one of Rosina's lively letters-and she was a very sprightly correspondent—gives an example of her style, of her husband's Pelhamish extravagance, and of the gaudy recklessness of their manner of life. They had now been married nearly two years:—

"How do you think my audacious husband has spent his time since he has been in town? Why, he must needs send me down what he termed a little Christmas box, which was a huge box from Howel and James's, containing only eight Gros de Naples dresses of different colours not made up, four Gros des Indes, two merino ones, four satin ones, an amber, a black, a white and a blue, eight pocket handkerchiefs that look as if they had been spun out of lilies and air and brodee by the fairies, they are so exquisitely fine and so beautifully worked. Four pieces (16 yards in each) of beautiful white blonde, two broad pieces and two less broad, a beautiful and very large blue real cashmere shawl, a Chantilly veil that would reach from this to Dublin, and six French long pellerines very richly embroidered on the finest India muslin, three dozen pair of white silk stockings, one dozen of black, a most beautiful black satin cloak with very pretty odd sort of capes and trimmed round and up the sides with a very broad band of a new kind of figured plush—I forget what they call it (it came from Paris), and a hat of the same—such a hat as can only be made in the Rue Vivienne. You would think that this 'little Christmas box' would have been enough to have lasted for some time. However, he thought differently, for on New Year's morning before I was out of bed, there came a parcel by the mail, which on opening proved to be a large red Morocco case containing a bright gold chain, a yard and a half long, with the most beautiful and curious cross to it that I ever saw—the chain is as thick as my dead gold necklace, and you may guess what sort of a thing it is when I tell you that I took it to a jeweller here to have it weighed, and it weighed a pound all but an ounce. The man said it never was made for less than fifty guineas, but that he should think it had cost more."

Rosina, who has only L80 a year of her own, will not be outdone, and cannot "resist ordering" Edward "a gold toilette, which he has long wished for.... Round the rim of the basin and the handle of the ewer I have ordered a wreath of narcissus in dead gold, which, for Mr. Pelham, you'll own, is not a bad idea."

It would be expected that all this crazy display would lead the young couple rapidly and deeply into debt. That it did not do so is the most curious phase of the story. Bulwer-Lytton immediately, and apparently without the slightest difficulty, developed a literary industry the sober record of which approaches the fabulous. Walter Scott alone may be held to have equalled it. The giants of popular fiction did, indeed, enjoy larger single successes than Bulwer-Lytton did, but none of them, not Dickens himself, was so uniformly successful. Everything he wrote sold as though it were bread displayed to a hungry crowd. Even his poetry, so laboriously and lifelessly second-hand, always sold. He did not know what failure was; he made money by Devereux; even The New Timon went into many editions. To earn what was required, however—and in these early years he seems to have made L3000 his minimum of needful return—to live in the insane style which his wife and he demanded, an enormous nervous strain was required. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's temper had always been warm and eager; it now grew irritable to the highest degree. His mother continued to exasperate him; his wife suddenly failed to please him; his health waned; and he became the most miserable of men; yet without ceasing for a moment to be the most indefatigable of authors. The reader will follow the evolution of the tragedy, which is of poignant interest, in Lord Lytton's pages. The whole story is one of the most extraordinary in the history of literature.

It has been a feature of Bulwer-Lytton's curious posthumous fortune that he has seemed solitary in his intellectual if not in his political and social action. We think of him as one of those morose and lonely bees that are too busy gathering pollen to join the senate of the hive, and are dwellers in the holes of the rocks. It is quite true that, with a painful craving for affection, he had not the genius of friendship. The general impression given by his biography is one of isolation; in "the sea of life" he was one of those who are most hopelessly "enisled." Nothing is sadder than this severance of a delicate and sensitive temperament from those who surround it closely and to whom it stretches out its arms in vain. But a careful reading of these interesting volumes leaves us in no doubt of the cause of this loneliness. Bulwer-Lytton, with all his ardour and his generosity, was devoid of the gift of sympathy. In characters of a simpler mould a natural kindliness may take the place of comprehension. But Bulwer-Lytton had a lively and protean fancy which perpetually deceived him. In human relations he was always moving, but always on the wrong track.

The letters to his mother, to his wife, to his son, exemplify this unfortunate tendency. They are eloquent, they are even too eloquent, for Bulwer-Lytton intoxicated himself with his own verbosity; they are meant to be kind, they are meant to be just, they are meant to be wise and dignified and tender; but we see, in Lord Lytton's impartial narrative, that they scarcely ever failed to exasperate the receiver. His dealings with his son, of whom he was exquisitely proud and sensitively fond, are of the saddest character, because of the father's want of comprehension, haste of speech and intolerance of temper. The very fact that a son, a wife, or a mother could with impunity be addressed in terms of exaggerated sensibility, because there could be no appeal, was a snare to the too-ready pen of Bulwer-Lytton, which, poured out its oceans of ink without reflection and without apprehension. If violent offence were given, the post went out again later in the day, and equally violent self-humiliation would restore the emotional balance. But what could not be restored was the sense of confidence and domestic security.

In his contact with other literary men of his own age more restraint was necessary, and we learn from Lord Lytton's pages of valuable and prolonged acquaintanceships which were sometimes almost friendships. His company was much sought after, and occasionally by very odd persons. Lord Lytton prints a series of most diverting letters from the notorious Harriette Wilson, who, in spite of the terror into which her "Memoirs" had thrown society, desired to add the author of Pelham to the aviary of her conquests. But the snare was set in vain before the eyes of so shrewd a bird as Bulwer-Lytton; he declined to see the lady, but he kept her amazing letters. This was in 1829, when the novelist seems to have had no literary or political associates. But by 1831, we find him editing the New Monthly Magazine, and attaching himself to Lord Melbourne and Lord Durham on the one hand and to Disraeli and Dickens on the other. When to these we have added Lady Blessington and Letitia Landon, we have mentioned all those public persons with whom Bulwer-Lytton seems to have been on terms of intimacy during his early manhood. All through these years he was an incessant diner-out and party-goer, and the object of marvellous adulation, but he passed through all this social parade as though it had been a necessary portion of the exterior etiquette of life. Why he fatigued himself by these formal exercises, in which he seems to have found no pleasure, it is impossible to conceive, but a sense of the necessity of parade was strangely native to him.

He had, however, one close and constant friend. John Forster was by far the most intimate of all his associates throughout his career. Bulwer-Lytton seems to have met him first about 1834, when he was twenty-eight and Forster only twenty-two. In spite of this disparity in age, the younger man almost at once took a tone of authority such as the elder seldom permitted in an acquaintance. Forster had all the gifts which make a friend valuable. He was rich in sympathy and resource, his temper was reasonable, he comprehended a situation, he knew how to hold his own in argument and yet yield with grace. Lord Lytton prints a very interesting character-sketch of Forster, which he has found among his grandfather's MSS. It is a tribute which does equal credit to him who makes it and to him of whom it is made:—

"John Forster.... A most sterling man, with an intellect at once massive and delicate. Few, indeed, have his strong practical sense and sound judgment; fewer still unite with such qualities his exquisite appreciation of latent beauties in literary art. Hence, in ordinary life, there is no safer adviser about literary work, especially poetry; no more refined critic. A large heart naturally accompanies so masculine an understanding. He has the rare capacity for affection which embraces many friendships without loss of depth or warmth in one. Most of my literary contemporaries are his intimate companions, and their jealousies of each other do not diminish their trust in him. More than any living critic, he has served to establish reputations. Tennyson and Browning owed him much in their literary career. Me, I think, he served in that way less than any of his other friends. But, indeed, I know of no critic to whom I have been much indebted for any position I hold in literature. In more private matters I am greatly indebted to his counsels. His reading is extensive. What faults he has lie on the surface. He is sometimes bluff to rudeness. But all such faults of manner (and they are his only ones) are but trifling inequalities in a nature solid and valuable as a block of gold."

This was written with full experience, as the names of Tennyson and Browning will remind us, for Bulwer-Lytton was slow to admit the value of these younger talents. His relations with Tennyson have always been known to be unfortunate; as they are revealed in Lord Lytton's biography they approach the incredible. He met Browning at Covent Garden Theatre during the Macready "revival" of the poetic stage, but it was not until after the publication of Men and Women that he became conscious of Browning's claim, which he then very grudgingly admitted. He was grateful to Browning for his kindness to Robert Lytton in Italy, but he never understood his genius or his character.

What, however, we read with no less pleasure than surprise are the evidences of Bulwer-Lytton's interest in certain authors of a later generation, of whom the general public has never suspected him to have been aware. Something almost like friendship sprang up as lately as 1867 between him and a man whom nobody would suppose him to admire, Matthew Arnold. It sometimes happens that a sensitive and petulant artist finds it more easy to acknowledge the merits of his successors than to endure those of his immediate contemporaries. The Essays in Criticism and The Study of Celtic Literature called forth from the author of My Novel and The Caxtons such eulogy as had never been spared for the writings of Thackeray or Carlyle. Matthew Arnold appeared to Bulwer-Lytton to have "brought together all that is most modern in sentiment, with all that is most scholastic in thought and language." Arnold was a guest at Knebworth, and brought the Duke of Genoa with him. He liked Bulwer-Lytton, and their relations became very cordial and lasted for some years; Arnold has given an amusing, but very sympathetic, account of the dignified hospitalities of Knebworth.

No revelation in Lord Lytton's volumes is, however, more pleasing or more unexpected than his grandfather's correspondence with Swinburne. It is thought that he heard of him through Monckton Milnes; at all events, he was an early reader of Atalanta in Calydon. When, in 1866, all the furies of the Press fell shrieking on Poems and Ballads, Bulwer-Lytton took a very generous step. He wrote to Swinburne, expressing his sympathy and begging him to be calm. The young poet was extremely touched, and took occasion to beg the elder writer for his advice, the publisher having, without consulting him, withdrawn his volume from sale. Bulwer-Lytton's reply was a most cordial invitation to stay with him at Knebworth and talk the matter over. Swinburne gratefully accepted, and John Forster was asked to meet him. It was Bulwer-Lytton, it appears, who found another publisher for the outraged volume, and helped Swinburne out of the scrape. He was always kindness itself if an appeal was made to his protection, and to his sense of justice. However, pleasant as the visit to Knebworth was, there is no evidence that it was repeated. Bulwer-Lytton considered Swinburne's opinions preposterous, and indeed if he told Swinburne, as in 1869 he told his son Robert, that Victor Hugo was "but an epileptic dwarf in a state of galvanism," there must have been wigs on the green at Knebworth.

The student of the biography, if he is already familiar with the more characteristic works of Bulwer-Lytton, will find himself for the first time provided with a key to much that has puzzled him in the nature of that author. The story itself, apart from the tragic matrimonial trouble which runs through it like a blood-red cord, is of unusual interest. It is a story of strife, without repose, without enjoyment, but with a good deal of splendour and satisfaction. Almost to the end Bulwer-Lytton was engaged in struggle. As an ambitious social being he was fighting the world; as an author he was battling with his critics; as a statesman he was always in the wild storm of party politics. As a private individual he was all the time keeping his head up against the tide of social scandal which attacked him when he least expected it, and often threatened to drown him altogether. This turmoil contrasts with the calm of the evening years, after the peerage had been won, the ambition satisfied, the literary reputation secured.

Few writers have encountered, in their own time and after their death, so much adverse criticism, and yet have partly survived it. It is hardly realised, even perhaps by Lord Lytton, how unwilling the reviewers were to give credit to his grandfather. He never found favour in their eyes, and it was a matter of constant resentment with him that they did him, as he thought, injustice. The evidence of his wounded feelings is constant in his letters. The Quarterly Review never mentioned him without contempt until 1865, when the publication of his works, in forty-three volumes, forced it to consider this indefatigable and popular writer with a measure of respect. Sir Walter Scott, with his universal geniality, read Pelham in 1828 and "found it very interesting: the light is easy and gentlemanlike, the dark very grand and sombrous." He asked who was the author, and he tried to interest his son-in-law in the novel. But Lockhart was implacable: "Pelham," he replied, "is writ by a Mr. Bulwer, a Norfolk squire, and horrid puppy. I have not read the book, from disliking the author." Lockhart, however, did read Devereux, and three years afterwards, when reviewing some other novel, he said of the historical characters in that romance: "It seems hard to disquiet so many bright spirits for the sole purpose of showing that they could be dull." That was the attitude of the higher criticism to Bulwer-Lytton from, let us say, 1830 to 1860; he was "a horrid puppy" and he was also "dull."

But this was far from being the opinion of the reading public. We have seen that he never failed, and sometimes he soared into the very empyrean of popularity. In 1834, when he published The Last Days of Pompeii, again in 1837 when he published Ernest Maltravers, the ecstasy of his adorers discovered their favourite in a moment under the mask of anonymity which he chose to assume. This was just before the outburst of the great school of Victorian novelists; Bulwer had as yet practically no one but Disraeli to compete with. These two, the author of Pelham and the author of Vivian Grey, raced neck and neck at the head of the vast horde of "fashionable" novel-writers; now all but them forgotten. In Bulwer-Lytton's romances the reader moved among exalted personages, alternately flippant and sinister; a "mournful enthusiasm" was claimed for the writer by the readers of his day. It was the latest and most powerful development of that Byronic spirit which had been so shortlived in verse, but which was to survive in prose until Bulwer-Lytton adopted his Caxtons manner in the middle of the century. As always in Byronic periods, the portrait of the author himself was searched for among his most fatal conceptions. To the young library subscriber the stoical, solitary figure of Mordaunt, in The Disowned, was exactly what was wanted as a representation of the mysterious novelist himself. Pelham was the apotheosis of the man of fashion, and it is amusing to read how, when the Bulwer-Lyttons travelled, they were gazed at in reverence as the Pelham and the Pelhamess.

It would be difficult to improve upon the language used so early as 1832 by one of the very few critics who attempted to do justice to Bulwer-Lytton's merits. The Edinburgh Review found in him "a style vigorous and pliable, sometimes strangely incorrect, but often rising into a touching eloquence." Ten years later such was the private opinion of D.G. Rossetti, who was "inspired by reading Rienzi and Ernest Maltravers, which is indeed a splendid work." Now that we look back at Bulwer-Lytton's prodigious compositions, we are able to perceive more justly than did the critics of his own day what his merits were. For one thing, he was extraordinarily versatile. If we examine his books, we must be astonished at their variety. He painted the social life of his own day, he dived into spectral romance, he revived the beautiful ceremonies of antiquity, he evoked the great shades of English and of Continental history, he made realistic and humorous studies of middle-class life, he engaged in vehement controversy on topics of the hour, he prophesied of the order of the future, he wrote comedies and tragedies, epics and epistles, satires and lyrics. His canvasses were myriad and he crowded every one of them with figures. At his most Byronic moment he flung his dark cloak aside, and danced in motley through Paul Clifford, with its outrageous caricature of George IV. and his Ministers as a gang of Hounslow highwaymen. Perhaps his best claim to regard is the insatiability of his human curiosity, evinced in the almost infinite variety of his compositions.

The singular being who wrote so large a library of works and whose actual features have so carefully been concealed from the public, will be known at last. The piety of his grandson has presented him to us with no reservations and no false lights. Here he stands, this half-fabulous being, not sheathed in sham armour and padding the stage in buskins, but a real personality at length, "with all his weaknesses and faults, his prejudices, affectations, vanities, susceptibilities, and eccentricities, and also with all his great qualities of industry, courage, kindness of heart; sound judgment, patience, and perseverance." Lord Lytton has carried through to the close a biographical enterprise of unusual difficulty, and he deserves the thanks of all students of English literature.



THE CHALLENGE OF THE BRONTES[7]

Although I possess in no degree the advantage which so many of the members of your society enjoy in being personally connected with the scenes and even, perhaps, with the characters associated with the Bronte family, I cannot begin my little address to you to-day without some invocation of the genius of the place. We meet at Dewsbury because the immortal sisters were identified with Dewsbury. Is it then not imperative that for whatever picture of them I may endeavour to present before you this afternoon, Dewsbury should form the background? Unfortunately, however, although in the hands of a skilful painter the figures of the ladies may glow forth, I fear that in the matter of taking Dewsbury as the background some vagueness and some darkness are inevitable. In the biographies of Mrs. Gaskell and of Mr. Clement Shorter, as well as in the proceedings of your society, I have searched for evidences of the place Dewsbury took in the lives of the Brontes. What I find—I expect you to tell me that it is not exhaustive—is this. Their father, the Rev. Patrick Bronte, was curate here from 1809 to 1811. In 1836, when Charlotte was twenty, Miss Wooler transferred her school from Roe Head to Heald's House at the top of Dewsbury Moor. In this school, where Charlotte had been a pupil since 1831, she was now a governess, and a governess she remained until early in 1838. In April of that year Miss Wooler was taken ill and Charlotte was for a little while in charge. Then there was an explosion of temper, of some kind, and Charlotte went back to Haworth.

That, then, in the main, is the limit of what the scrupulous Muse of history vouchsafes to tell us about Charlotte Bronte's relation to Dewsbury. But it also supplies us with one or two phrases which I cannot bring myself to spare you. In January 1838, Charlotte reviews her experience at Dewsbury Moor; "I feel," she says, "in nothing better, nothing humbler nor purer." Again, in 1841, after there had passed time enough to mellow her exacerbations, she continues to express herself with vigour. Miss Wooler is making overtures to Charlotte and Emily to take over the school at Heald's House; perhaps a place might be found for Anne as well. Miss Wooler, one of the kindest of women, is most thoughtful, most conciliatory. Charlotte will have none of the idea; she puts it roughly from her. Of Dewsbury she has nothing to say but that "it is a poisoned place for me." This is all we know of Charlotte's relation to Dewsbury, yet nothing, you will tell me, in Froude's phrase, to what the angels know. Well, I must be frank with you and say that I am afraid the angels have been inclined to record exceedingly little of Charlotte Bronte's residence in your inoffensive neighbourhood. I have to paint a background to my picture, and I find none but the gloomiest colours. They have to be what the art-critics of the eighteenth century called "sub-fusc." But it is not the fault of Dewsbury, it is the fault, or the misfortune, of our remarkable little genius. She was here, in this wholesome and hospitable vicinity, for several months, during which time "she felt in nothing better, neither humbler nor purer," and looking back upon it, she had to admit that it was "a poisoned place" to her.

I cannot help fancying that you will agree with me, that on such an occasion as the present, and especially when dealing with a group of writers about whom so much as has been said as about the Brontes, it is wise not to cover too wide a ground, but to take, and keep to, one aspect of the subject. Our little excursion into the history seems to have given us, under the heading "Dewsbury," a rather grim text, from which, nevertheless, we may perhaps extract some final consolation. Let me say at the outset that for the grimness, for the harshness, Dewsbury is not at all to blame. I fancy that if, in the years from 1836 to 1838, the Bronte girls had been visitors to Kubla Khan, and had been fed on honey by his myrmidons at Xanadu, that pleasure-dome would yet have been "poisoned" to them. It was not poverty, and cold, and the disagreeable position of a governess, it was not the rough landscape of your moors, nor its lack of southern amenity which made Charlotte wretched here. It was not in good Miss Wooler, nor in the pupils, nor in the visitors at Heald's House that the mischief lay, it was in the closed and patient crater of Charlotte's own bosom. And I am almost persuaded that, if you had lived in Dewsbury sixty-five years ago, you would have heard on very quiet days a faint subterranean sound which you would never have been able to guess was really the passion, furiously panting, shut up in the heart of a small, pale governess in Heald's House schoolroom.

If you accuse me of fatalism, I am helpless in your hands, for I confess I do not see how it could be otherwise, and do scarcely wish that it could have been. Let us not be too sentimental in this matter. Figures in literature are notable and valuable to us for what they give us. The more personal and intense and definite that is, the greater the gift, the more strenuous the toil and the more severe the initiation which lead to its expression. The Brontes had a certain thing to learn to give; what that was we shall presently try to note. But whatever we find it to be, we start with allowing that it was extremely and boldly original. It was not to be mastered by lying upon padded sofas and toying with a little Berlin wool-work. It involved pain, resistance, a stern revision of things hitherto taken for granted. The secrets which they designed to wring from nature and from life were not likely to be revealed to the self-indulgent and the dilettante. The sisters had a message from the sphere of indignation and revolt. In order that they should learn it as well as teach it, it was necessary that they should arrive on the scene at an evil hour for their own happiness. Jane Eyre and Shirley and Villette could not have been written unless, for long years, the world had been "a poisoned place" for Charlotte Bronte.

It has been excellently said by Mrs. Humphry Ward that in many respects, and to the very last, the Brontes challenge no less than they attract us. This is an aspect which, in the midst of rapturous modern heroine-worship, we are apt to forget. Thackeray, who respected the genius of the family, and was immensely kind to the author of Jane Eyre, never really felt comfortable in her company. We know how he stole out of his own front-door, and slipped away into the night to escape her. "A very austere little person," he called her, and we may put what emphasis on the austerity we will. I feel sure that any maladroit "white-washing of Charlotte" will tend, sooner or later, good-natured though it may be, in a failure to comprehend what she really was, in what her merit consisted, what the element in her was that, for instance, calls us here together nearly half a century after she completed her work and passed away. Young persons of genius very commonly write depressing books; since, the more vivid an unripe creature's impression of life is, the more acute is its distress. It is only extremely stupid Sunday-school children who shout in chorus, "We are so happy, happy, happy!" Genius thrown naked, with exposed nerves, on a hard indifferent world, is never "happy" at first. Earth is a "poisoned place" to it, until it has won its way and woven its garments and discovered its food.

But in the case of Charlotte Bronte, unhappiness was more than juvenile fretfulness. All her career was a revolt against conventionality, against isolation, against irresistible natural forces, such as climate and ill-health and physical insignificance. Would this insubmissive spirit have passed out of her writings, as it passed, for instance, out of those of George Sand? I am not sure, for we see it as strongly, though more gracefully and skilfully expressed, in Villette as in the early letters which her biographers have printed. Her hatred of what was commonplace and narrow and obvious flung her against a wall of prejudice, which she could not break down. She could only point to it by her exhausting efforts; she could only invite the generation which succeeded her to bring their pickaxes to bear upon it. Hence, to the very last, she seems, more than any other figure in our literature, to be forever ruffled in temper, for ever angry and wounded and indignant, rejecting consolation, crouched like a sick animal in the cavern of her own quenchless pride. This is not an amiable attitude, nor is it historically true that this was Charlotte Bronte's constant aspect. But I will venture to say that her amiabilities, her yielding moods, are really the unessential parts of her disposition, and that a certain admirable ferocity is the notable feature of her intellectual character.

Her great heart was always bleeding. Here at Dewsbury, in the years we are contemplating, the hemorrhage was of the most doleful kind, for it was concealed, suppressed, it was an inward flow. When once she became an author the pain of her soul was relieved. She said, in 1850, looking back on the publication of the hapless first volume of poems, "The mere effort to succeed gave a wonderful zest to existence." Then, a little later, when no one had paid the slightest attention to the slender trio of maiden voices, "Something like the chill of despair began to invade their hearts." With a less powerful inspiration, they must have ceased to make the effort; they must have succumbed in a melancholy oblivion. But they were saved by the instinct of a mission. It was not their private grief which primarily stirred them. What urged them on was the dim consciousness that they gave voice to a dumb sense of the suffering of all the world. They had to go on working; they had to pursue their course, though it might seem sinister or fatal; their business was to move mankind, not to indulge or please it. They "must be honest; they must not varnish, soften, or conceal."

What Charlotte Bronte was learning to do in her grim and, let us admit it, her unlovely probation on Dewsbury Moor, was to introduce a fresh aspect of the relations of literature to life. Every great writer has a new note; hers was—defiance. All the aspects in which life presented itself to her were distressing, not so much in themselves as in herself. She rebelled against the outrages of poverty, and she drank to its dregs the cup of straitened circumstances. She was proud, as proud as Lucifer, and she was forced into positions which suppleness and cheerfulness might have made tolerable, if not agreeable. She wrung from these positions their last drop of bitterness. A very remarkable instance of this may be found in her relation to the Sidgwick family, who, by universal report, were generous, genial, and unassuming. To Charlotte Bronte these kindly, if somewhat commonplace folk, grew to seem what a Turkish pasha seems to the inhabitants of a Macedonian village. It was not merely the surroundings of her life—it was life itself, in its general mundane arrangements, which was intolerable to her. She fretted in it, she beat her wings against its bars, and she would have done the same if those bars had been of gold, and if the fruits of paradise had been pushed to her between them. This, I think, is why the expression of her anger seems too often disproportionate, and why her irony is so apt to be preposterous. She was born to resist being caged in any form. Her defiance was universal, and often it was almost indiscriminate.

Do not let us presume to blame this insubmission. Still less let us commit the folly of minimising it. A good cheerful little Charlotte Bronte, who thought the best of everybody, who gaily took her place without a grudging sigh, whose first aim was to make those about her happy and to minister to their illusions, would have been a much more welcome inmate of Miss Wooler's household than the cantankerous governess whom nobody could please, whose susceptibilities were always on edge, whose lonely arrogance made her feared by all but one or two who timidly persisted in loving her. But such a paragon of the obvious virtues would have passed as the birds pass and as the flowers. She would have left no mark behind. She would never have enriched the literature of England by one of its master-evidences of the force of human will. She would never have stirred hundreds of thousands of consciences to a wholesome questioning of fate and their own souls.

Let us endeavour to pursue the inquiry a few steps further. It is impossible to separate the ethical conditions of an author's mind from the work that he produces. The flower requires the soil; it betrays in its colour and its perfume the environment of its root. The moral constitution of the writer is reflected in the influence of the written page. This is the incessant contention; on one hand the independence of art asserts itself; on the other, it is impossible to escape from the implicit influence of conduct upon art. There have been few writers of any age in whom this battle raged more fiercely than it did in Charlotte Bronte. Her books, and those of her sisters, seem anodyne enough to-day; to readers of a sensitive species they seemed, when they were published, as dangerous as Werther had been, as seductive as the Nouvelle Heloise. The reason of this was, in the main, the spirit of revolt which inspired them. There was something harsh and glaring in their landscape; there was that touch of Salvator Rosa which one of their earliest critics observed in them. But more essential was the stubbornness, the unflinching determination to revise all accepted formulas of conduct, to do this or that, not because it was usual to do it, but because it was rational, and in harmony with human nature.

Into an age which had become almost exclusively utilitarian, and in which the exercise of the imagination, in its real forms, was sedulously discountenanced, Charlotte Bronte introduced passion in the sphere of prose fiction, as Byron had introduced it in the sphere of verse thirty years earlier. It was an inestimable gift; it had to come to us, from Charlotte Bronte or another, to save our literature from a decline into triviality and pretension. But she suffered, as Byron had suffered, in the direct ratio of her originality. If a writer employs passion in an age which has ceased to recognise it as one of the necessities of literary vitality he is safe to be accused of perverting his readers. Balzac says, "When nothing else can be charged against an author, the reproach of immorality is thrown at his head." When we study the record of the grim life of the sisters at Haworth, like that of three young soldiers round a camp-fire with the unseen enemy prowling in the darkness just out of their sight—when we think of the strenuous vigil, the intractable and indomitable persistence, the splendour of the artistic result—we may console ourselves in our anger at the insults they endured, by reflecting how little they cared. And their noble indifference to opinion further endears them to us. We may repeat of them all what Charlotte in a letter once said of Emily, "A certain harshness in her powerful and peculiar character only makes me cling to her more."

This insubmissiveness, which was the unconscious armour given to protect her against the inevitable attacks of fortune, while, on the other hand, it was the very sign-manual of Charlotte's genius, was, on the other, a drawback from which she did not live long enough to emancipate her nature. It is responsible for her lack of interest in what is delicate and complex; it excused to herself a narrowness of vision which we are sometimes tempted to find quite distressing. It is probably the cause of a fault that never quits her for long, a tendency to make her characters express themselves with a lyrical extravagance which sometimes comes close to the confines of rodomontade. Charlotte Bronte never arrives at that mastery of her material which permits the writer to stand apart from his work, and sway the reader with successive tides of emotion while remaining perfectly calm himself. Nor is she one of those whose visible emotion is nevertheless fugitive, like an odour, and evaporates, leaving behind it works of art which betray no personal agitation. On the contrary, her revolt, her passion, all the violence of her sensibility, are present on her written page, and we cannot read it with serenity or with a merely captious curiosity, because her own eager spirit, immortal in its active force, seems to throb beside it.

The aspect of Charlotte Bronte which I have tried to indicate to you to-day, and which I have sketched thus hastily and slightly against the background of her almost voiceless residence in Dewsbury, is far from being a complete or unique one. I offer it to you only as a single facet of her wonderful temperament, of the rich spectacle of her talent. I have ventured to propose it, because, in the multiplication of honours and attentions, the tendency to deify the human, to remove those phenomena of irregularity which are the evidence of mortal strength, grows irresistible, and we find ourselves, unconsciously, substituting a waxen bust, with azure eyes and golden hair, for the homely features which (if we could but admit it) so infinitely better match the honest stories. Let us not busy ourselves to make excuse for our austere little genius of the moors. Let us be content to take her exactly as she was, with her rebellion and her narrowness, her angers and her urgencies, perceiving that she had to be this sorrowful offspring of a poisoned world in order to clear the wells of feeling for others, and to win from emancipated generations of free souls the gratitude which is due to a precursor.

[Footnote 7: Address delivered before the Bronte Society in the Town Hall of Dewsbury, March 28th, 1903.]



THE NOVELS OF BENJAMIN DISRAELI

It is not easy for a man whose sovereign ambition is seen to be leading him with great success in a particular direction to obtain due credit for what he accomplishes with less manifest success in another. There is no doubt that Disraeli as an author has, at all events until very lately, suffered from the splendour of his fame as a politician. But he was an author long before he became a statesman, and it certainly is a little curious that even in his youth, although he was always commercially successful with his books, they were never, as we say, "taken seriously" by the critics. His earliest novels were largely bought, and produced a wide sensation, but they were barely accepted as contributions to literature. If we look back to the current criticism of those times, we find such a book as Dacre, a romance by the Countess of Morley, which is now absolutely forgotten, treated with a dignity and a consideration never accorded to The Young Duke or to Henrietta Temple. Even Disraeli's satiric squibs, in the manner of Lucian and Swift, which seem to us among the most durable ornaments of light literature in the days of William IV., were read and were laughed at, but were not critically appraised.

So, too, at the middle period of Disraeli's literary life, such books as Coningsby and Tancred were looked upon as amusing commentaries on the progress of a strenuous politician, not by any means, or by any responsible person, as possible minor classics of our language. And at his third period, the ruling criticism of the hour was aghast at faults which now entertain us, and was blind to sterling merits which we are now ready to acknowledge. Shortly after his death, perhaps his most brilliant apologist was fain to admit that if Disraeli had been undistinguished as a speaker, his novels would have been "as the flowers of the field, charming for the day which was passing over them, and then forgotten." It is only since the beginning of the present century that a conviction has been gaining ground that some of these books were in themselves durable, not because they were the work of a man who became Prime Minister of England and made his sovereign Empress of India, but as much or as little as if they had been composed by a recluse in a hermitage. This impression has now become so general with enlightened critics that the danger seems to be that we should underrate certain excesses of rhetoric and the Corinthian mode the errors of which used to be over-emphasised, but should not, in a comparative survey of Victorian literature, be neglected as serious drawbacks to our perfect enjoyment of the high-spirited, eloquent, and ardent writings of Benjamin Disraeli. It is in this spirit of moderation that I now attempt a rapid sketch of his value as an English author.

I

There is, perhaps, no second example of a writer whose work is divided, as is that of Disraeli, into three totally distinct periods. Other authors, as for example, the poet Crabbe, and in a less marked degree Rogers, have abandoned the practice of writing for a considerable number of years, and then have resumed it. But the case of Disraeli seems to be unique as that of a man who pursued the writing, of books with great ardour during three brief and independent spaces of time. We have his first and pre-Parliamentarian period, which began with Vivian Grey (1826) and closed with Venetia (1837). We have a second epoch, opening with Coningsby (1844) and ending with Tancred (1847), during which time he was working out his political destiny; and we have the novels which he wrote after he had won the highest distinction in the State. Certain general characteristics are met with in all these three classes, but they have also differences which require to be noted and accounted for. It will, therefore, be convenient to treat them successively.

As oblivion scatters its poppy over the prose fiction of the reigns of George IV. and William IV., it becomes in creasingly dangerous that criticism should take the early "fashionable" novels of Disraeli as solitary representations of literary satire or observation. It is true that to readers of to-day this class of romance is exclusively suggestive of Vivian Grey and its fellows, with perhaps the Pelham of Bulwer. But this was not the impression of the original readers of these novels, who were amused by them, but found nothing revolutionary in their treatment of society. In the course of The Young Duke, written in 1829, Disraeli suggests an amiable rivalry with the romances "written by my friends Mr. Ward and Mr. Bulwer." The latter name had only just risen above the horizon, but that of Plumer Ward, forgotten as it now is, was one to conjure by. Ward was the author of Tremaine (1825) and De Vere (1827), two novels of the life of a modern English gentleman, which seems to a reader to-day to be insipid and dull enough. But they contained "portraits" of public persons, they undertook to hold the mirror up to the political and fashionable world of London, and they lashed that fastidiousness which was considered to be the foible of the age.

The books of Plumer Ward, who was an accomplished personage in advancing years, were treated with marked distinction in the press, and were welcomed by critics who deigned to take little notice of even such books as Granby and Dacre. But the stories of the youthful Disraeli belonged to a class held in still less esteem than those just mentioned. They had to hold their own as best they might in rivalry with a huge flight of novels of fashionable life, all of them curiously similar in general treatment. Above these the romances of Plumer Ward rose in a sort of recognised dignity, as two peaks around which were crowded innumerable hillocks. It is necessary to recall readers of to-day, who think of Vivian Grey as a work of amazing novelty, to the fact that the genre it represents to us was one which had been lifted into high credit the year before by the consecrated success of Tremaine, and was at that moment cultivated by a multitude of minor novelists.

There was, however, a distinction, and it lay in the greater fund of animal spirits which Disraeli brought to his business. Vivian Grey was absurd, but it was fresh and popular, and it pleased at once. As the opening work of a literary career, it promised well; the impertinent young gentleman dashed off to Parnassus at a gallop. It was a bold bid for personal distinction, which the author easily perceived already to be "the only passport to the society of the great in England." Vivian Grey is little more than a spirited and daring boy's book; Disraeli himself called it "a hot and hurried sketch." It was a sketch of what he had never seen, yet of what he had begun to foresee with amazing lucidity. It is a sort of social fairy-tale, where every one has exquisite beauty, limitless wealth, and exalted rank, where the impossible and the hyperbolic are the only homely virtues. There has always been a tendency to exalt Vivian Grey at the expense of The Young Duke (1831), Disraeli's next leading permanence; and, indeed, the former has had its admirers who have preferred it to all the others in this period. The difference is, however, not so marked as might be supposed. In The Young Duke the manner is not so burlesque, but there is the same roughness of execution, combined with the same rush and fire. In either book, what we feel to-day to be the great objection to our enjoyment is the lack of verisimilitude. Who can believe in the existence of persons whose titles are the Earl of Fitz-Pompey and Baron Deprivyseal, or whose names are Lady Aphrodite and Sir Carte Blanche? The descriptions are "high-falutin" beyond all endurance, and there is particularly noticeable a kind of stylistic foppery, which is always hovering between sublimity and a giggle.

But here is an example, from Vivian Grey, of Disraeli's earliest manner:—

"After a moment had passed, he was pouring forth in a rapid voice, and incoherent manner, such words as men speak only once. He spoke of his early follies, his misfortunes, his misery; of his matured views, his settled principles, his plans, his prospects, his hopes, his happiness, his bliss; and when he had ceased, he listened, in his turn, to some small still words, which made him the happiest of human beings. He bent down, he kissed the soft silken cheek which now he could call his own. Her hand was in his; her head sank upon his breast. Suddenly she clung to him with a strong clasp. 'Violet! my own, my dearest; you are overcome. I have been rash, I have been imprudent. Speak, speak, my beloved! say, you are not ill!'

"She spoke not, but clung to him with a fearful strength, her head still upon his breast, her full eyes closed. Alarmed, he raised her off the ground, and bore her to the river-side. Water might revive her. But when he tried to lay her a moment on the bank, she clung to him gasping, as a sinking person clings to a stout swimmer. He leant over her; he did not attempt to disengage her arms; and, by degrees, by very slow degrees, her grasp loosened. At last her arms gave way and fell by her side, and her eyes partly opened.

"'Thank God! Violet, my own, my beloved, say you are better!'

"She answered not, evidently she did not know him, evidently she did not see him. A film was on her sight, and her eye was glassy. He rushed to the water-side, and in a moment he had sprinkled her temples, now covered with a cold dew. Her pulse beat not, her circulation seemed suspended. He rubbed the palms of her hands, he covered her delicate feet with his coat, and then rushing up the bank into the road, he shouted with frantic cries on all sides. No one came, no one was near. Again, with a cry of fearful anguish, he shouted as if an hyena were feeding on his vitals. No sound; no answer. The nearest cottage was above a mile off. He dared not leave her. Again he rushed down to the water-side. Her eyes were still open, still fixed. Her mouth also was no longer closed. Her hand was stiff, her heart had ceased to beat. He tried with the warmth of his own body to revive her. He shouted, he wept, he prayed. All, all in vain. Again he was in the road, again shouting like an insane being. There was a sound. Hark! It was but the screech of an owl!

"Once more at the river-side, once more bending over her with starting eyes, once more the attentive ear listening for the soundless breath. No sound! not even a sigh! Oh! what would he have given for her shriek of anguish! No change had occurred in her position, but the lower part of her face had fallen; and there was a general appearance which struck him with awe. Her body was quite cold, her limbs stiffened. He gazed, and gazed, and gazed. He bent over her with stupor rather than grief stamped on his features. It was very slowly that the dark thought came over his mind, very slowly that the horrible truth seized upon his soul. He gave a loud shriek, and fell on the lifeless body of VIOLET FANE!"

A line in Disraeli's unfortunate tragedy of Alarcos pathetically admits: "Ay! ever pert is youth that baffles age!" The youth of Disraeli was "pert" beyond all record, and those who cannot endure to be teased should not turn to his early romances, or, indeed, to any of his writings. Henrietta Temple is the boldest attempt he ever made to tell a great consecutive story of passion, and no doubt there have been those who have palpitated over the love-at-first-sight of Ferdinand Armine and Henrietta Temple. But Disraeli's serious vein is here over-luscious; the love-passages are too emphatic and too sweet. An early critic spoke of this dulcia vitia of style which we meet with even in Contarini Fleming as the sin by which the young author was most easily beset. His attempts at serious sentiment and pompous reflection are too often deplorable, because inanimate and stilted. When he warns a heroine against an error of judgment by shouting, "'Tis the madness of the fawn who gazes with adoration on the lurid glare of the anaconda's eye," or murmurs, "Farewell, my lovely bird; I'll soon return to pillow in thy nest," we need all the stimulus of his irony and his velocity to carry us over such marshlands of cold style.

Of these imperfections, fewer are to be found in Venetia and fewest in Contarini Fleming. This beautiful romance is by far the best of Disraeli's early books, and that in which his methods at this period can be most favourably studied. A curious shadow of Disraeli himself is thrown over it all; it cannot be styled in any direct sense an autobiography, and yet the mental and moral experiences of the author animate every chapter of it. This novel is written with far more ease and grace than any previous book of the author's, and Contarini gives a reason which explains the improvement in his creator's manner when he remarks: "I wrote with greater facility than before, because my experience of life was so much increased that I had no difficulty in making my characters think and act." Contarini Fleming belongs to 1831, when its writer, at the comparatively ripe age of twenty-seven, had already seen a vast deal of man and of the world of Europe.

We are not to believe the preposterous account that Contarini-Disraeli gives of his methods of composition:—

"My thoughts, my passion, the rush of my invention, were too quick for my pen. Page followed page; as a sheet was finished I threw it on the floor; I was amazed at the rapid and prolific production, yet I could not stop to wonder. In half a dozen hours I sank back exhausted, with an aching frame. I rang the bell, ordered some refreshment, and walked about the room. The wine invigorated me and warmed up my sinking fancy, which, however, required little fuel. I set to it again, and it was midnight before I retired to bed."

At this rate we may easily compute that the longest of his novels would be finished in a week. Contarini Fleming seems to have occupied him the greater part of a year. He liked the public to think of him, exquisitely habited, his long essenced hair falling about his eyes, flinging forth a torrent of musky and mellifluous improvisation; as a matter of fact he was a very hard worker, laborious in the arts of composition.

It is to be noted that the whole tone of Contarini Fleming is intensely literary. The appeal to the intellectual, to the fastidious reader is incessant. This is an attitude always rare in English fiction, but at that epoch almost unknown, and its presence in the writings of Disraeli gives them a cachet. Under all the preposterous conversation, all the unruly turmoil of description, there runs a strong thread of entirely sober, political, and philosophical ambition. Disraeli striving with all his might to be a great poet, of the class of Byron and Goethe, a poet who is also a great mover and master of men—this is what is manifest to us throughout Contarini Fleming. It is almost pathetically manifest, because Disraeli—whatever else he grew to be—never became a poet. And here, too, his wonderful clairvoyance, and his command over the vagaries of his own imagination, come into play, for he never persuades himself, with all his dithyrambics, that Contarini is quite a poet.

A new influence is felt upon his style, and it is a highly beneficial one. Up to this date, Disraeli had kept Byron before him, and in his serious moments he had endeavoured to accomplish in prose what the mysterious and melancholy poet of the preceding generation had done in verse. The general effect of this Byronism, in spite of a certain buoyancy which carried the reader onwards, had been apt to be wearisome, in consequence of the monotony of effort. The fancy of the author had been too uniformly grandiose, and in the attempt to brighten it up he had sometimes passed over into positive failure. The most unyielding admirers of his early novels can hardly contradict a reader who complains that he finds the adventures of the bandits at Jonstorna insupportable and the naivete of Christiana mawkish. There are pages in Alroy that read as if they were written for a wager, to see how much balderdash the public will endure. Disraeli seems to have been conscious of this weakness, and he tried to relieve the pompous gravity of his passionate scenes by episodes of irony and satire. From his earliest days these were apt to be very happy; they were inspired, especially in the squibs, by Lucian and Swift.

But in Contarini Fleming we detect a new flavour, and it is a very fortunate one. The bitterness of Swift was never quite in harmony with the genius of Disraeli, but the irony of Voltaire was. The effect of reading Zadig and Candide was the completion of the style of Disraeli; that "strange mixture of brilliant fantasy and poignant truth" which he rightly perceived to be the essence of the philosophic contes of Voltaire, finished his own intellectual education. Henceforth he does not allow his seriousness to overweigh his liveliness; if he detects a tendency to bombast, he relieves it with a brilliant jest. Count de Moltke and the lampoons offer us a case to our hand; "he was just the old fool who would make a cream cheese," says Contarini, and the startled laugh which greets him is exactly of the same order as those which were wont to reward the statesman's amazing utterances in Parliament.

In spite of a certain undeniable insipidity, the volumes of Contarini Fleming cannot but be read with pleasure. The mixture of Byron and Voltaire is surprising, but it produces some agreeable effects. There is a dash of Shelley in it, too, for the life on the isle of Paradise with Alceste Contarini is plainly borrowed from Epiphsychidion. Disraeli does not even disdain a touch of "Monk" Lewis without his voluptuousness, and of Mrs. Radcliffe without her horrors, for he is bent on serving up an olio entirely in the taste of the day. But through it all he is conspicuously himself, and the dedication to beauty and the extraordinary intellectual exultation of such a book as Contarini Fleming are borrowed from no exotic source.

It is impossible to overlook the fascination which Venice exercises over Disraeli in these early novels. Contarini's great ambition was to indite "a tale which should embrace Venice and Greece." Byron's Life and Letters and the completion of Rogers' Italy with Turner's paradisaical designs had recently awakened to its full the romantic interest which long had been gathering around "the sun-girt city." Whenever Disraeli reaches Venice his style improves, and if he mourns over her decay, his spirits rise when he has to describe her enchantments by moonlight. He reserves his most delicate effects for Greece and Venice:—

"A Grecian sunset! The sky is like the neck of a dove! the rocks and waters are bathed with a violet light. Each moment it changes; each moment it shifts into more graceful and more gleaming shadows. And the thin white moon is above all; the thin white moon, followed by a single star, like a lady by a page."

There are many passages as sumptuous as this in Venetia, the romance about Byron and Shelley, which Disraeli was thought indiscreet in publishing so soon after Byron's death. In the story the heroine Venetia is the daughter of Shelley (Marmion Herbert) and the bride of Byron (Lord Cadurcis). Marmion is a most melodramatic figure, but the indiscretions are not noticeable nowadays, while the courage with which the reviled and hated Shelley is described in the preface to Lord Lyndhurst as one of "the most renowned and refined spirits that have adorned these our latter days" is highly characteristic of Disraeli. The reception of Lord Cadurcis in the House of Peers and the subsequent riot in Palace Yard mark, perhaps, the highest point in direct narrative power which the novelist had yet reached; but Venetia was not liked, and Disraeli withdrew from literature into public life.

II

When Disraeli resumed the art of the novelist, he was no longer talking of what lay outside his experience when he touched on politics. In 1837 he had entered the House at last, as Member for Maidstone, and although his enemies roared him down on the first occasion of his rising to speak, he soon learned how to impose his voice on Parliament. In 1839 his declaration that "the rights of labour are as sacred as the rights of property" made him famous, and in 1841 he was one of Sir Robert Peel's Conservative army in the House. Then followed the formation of the Young England Party, with Disraeli as one of its leaders; these men broke away from Peel, and held that the Tory Party required stringent reform from within. It was in 1843 that Henry Thomas Hope, of Deepdene, urged, at a meeting of the Young Englanders, the expediency of Disraeli's "treating in a literary form those views and subjects which were the matter of their frequent conversations." Disraeli instantly returned to literary composition, and produced in quick succession the four books which form the second section of his work as an author; these are Coningsby, Sybil, Tancred, and the Life of Lord George Bentinck.

In this group of books we observe, in the first place, a great advance in vitality and credibility over the novels of the earlier period. Disraeli is now describing what he knows, no longer what he hopes in process of time to know. He writes from within, no longer from without the world of political action. These three novels and a biography are curiously like one another in form, and all equally make a claim to be considered not mere works of entertainment, but serious contributions to political philosophy. The assumption is borne out by the character of the books, each of which had a definite aim and purpose. Coningsby was designed to make room for new talent in the Tory Party by an unflinching attack on the "mediocrities." In Sybil the heartless abuse of capital and the vices of class distinction are exposed. Tancred is a vision of better things to follow upon the reforms already indicated. In Lord George Bentinck, under the guise of a record of the struggle between Protection and Free Trade, we have a manual of personal conduct as applied to practical politics.

In all these works narrative pure and simple inclines to take a secondary place. It does so least in Coningsby which, as a story, is the most attractive book of Disraeli's middle period, and one of the most brilliant studies of political character ever published. The tale is interspersed with historical essays, which impede its progress but add to its weight and value. Where, however, the author throws himself into his narrative, the advance he has made in power, and particularly in truth of presentment, is very remarkable. In the early group of his novels he had felt a great difficulty in transcribing conversations so as to produce a natural and easy effect. He no longer, in Coningsby, is confronted by this artificiality. His dialogues are now generally remarkable for their ease and nature. The speeches of Rigby (who represents John Wilson Croker), of Lord Monmouth (who stands for Lord Hertford), of the Young Englanders themselves, of the laughable chorus of Taper and Tadpole, who never "despaired of the Commonwealth," are often extremely amusing. In Coningsby we have risen out of the rose-coloured mist of unreality which hung over books like The Young Duke and Henrietta Temple. The agitated gentleman whose peerage hangs in the balance, and who on hearing that the Duke of Wellington is with the King breathes out in a sigh of relief "Then there is a Providence," is a type of the subsidiary figure which Disraeli had now learned to introduce with infinite lightness of irony.

Disraeli had a passion for early youth, and in almost all his books he dwells lovingly upon its characteristics. It is particularly in Contarini Fleming and in Coningsby—that is to say, in the best novels of his first and of his second period—that he lingers over the picture of schoolboy life with tenderness and sympathy. We have only to compare them, however, to see how great an advance he had made in ten years in his power of depicting such scenes. The childish dreams of Contarini are unchecked romance, and though the friendship with Musaeus is drawn with delicacy and insight, and though that is an extremely pretty scene where Christiana soothes the pride of Contarini, yet a manliness and a reality are missing which we find in the wonderful Eton scenes of Coningsby.

Disraeli's comprehension of the feelings of half-grown ambitious boys of good family was extraordinary, and when we consider that he had never been to a public school, his picture of the life and conversation at Eton is remarkable for its fidelity to nature. The relation of the elder schoolboys to one another—a theme to which he was fond of recurring—is treated in a very adroit and natural spirit, not without a certain Dorian beauty. This preoccupation with the sentiments and passions of schoolboys was rather crudely found fault with at the time. We need have no difficulty in comprehending the pleasure he felt in watching the expansion of those youthful minds from whom he hoped for all that was to make England wise and free. The account of Coningsby's last night at Eton is one of the most deeply felt pages which Disraeli ever composed, and here it may be said that the careful avoidance of all humour—an act of self-denial which a smaller writer would not have been capable of—is justified by the dignified success of a very dangerous experiment.

The portraiture of living people is performed with the greatest good-nature. It is difficult to believe that the most sensitive and the most satirised could really be infuriated, so kindly and genial is the caricaturing. We are far here from Swift's bludgeon and from Voltaire's poisoned needle. The regeneration of the social order in England, as Disraeli dreamed it, involved the removal of some mediocrities, but he was neither angry nor impatient. The "brilliant personages who had just scampered up from Melton, thinking it probable that Sir Robert might want some moral Lords of the Bedchamber," and the Duke, who "might have acquired considerable information, if he had not in his youth made so many Latin verses," were true to their principles, and would scarcely have done more than blush faintly when he poked his fun at them. Of all the portraits none is more interesting than that of the dark, pale stranger, Sidonia, as he revealed himself to Coningsby at the inn in the forest, over the celebrated dish of "still-hissing bacon and eggs that looked like tufts of primroses." This was a figure which was to recur, and to become in the public mind almost coincident with that of Disraeli himself.

When we pass from Coningsby to Sybil we find the purely narrative interest considerably reduced in the pursuit of a scheme of political philosophy. This is of all Disraeli's novels the one which most resembles a pamphlet on a serious topic. For this reason it has never been a favourite among his works, and his lighter readers have passed it over with a glance. Sybil, however, is best not read at all if it is not carefully studied. In the course of Coningsby, that young hero had found his way to Manchester, and had discovered in it a new world, "poignant with new ideas, and suggestive of new trains of thought and feeling." His superficial observation had revealed many incongruities in our methods of manipulating wealth, and Disraeli had sketched the portrait of Mr. Jawster Sharp with a superfluity of sarcastic wit. But it was not until somewhat later that the condition of the working-classes in our northern manufacturing districts began to attract his most serious attention. The late Duke of Rutland, that illustrious and venerable friend who alone survived in the twentieth century to bear witness to the sentiments of Young England, told me that he accompanied Disraeli on the journey which led to the composition of Sybil, and that he never, in long years of intimacy, saw him so profoundly moved as he was at the aspect of the miserable dwellings of the hand-loom workers.

All this is reflected on the surface of Sybil, and, notwithstanding curious faults in execution, the book bears the impress of a deep and true emotion. Oddly enough, the style of Disraeli is never more stilted than it is in the conversations of the poor in this story. When Gerard, the weaver, wishes to prevent the police-inspector from arresting his daughter, he remarks: "Advance and touch this maiden, and I will fell you and your minions like oxen at their pasture." Well may the serjeant answer, "You are a queer chap." Criticism goes further and says, "You are a chap who never walked in wynd or factory of a Yorkshire town." This want of nature, which did not extend to Disraeli's conversations among well-to-do folks, was a real misfortune, and gave Sybil no chance of holding its own in rivalry with such realistic studies of the depression of trade in Manchester as Mrs. Gaskell was presently to produce, nor with the ease of dialogue in Dickens' Christmas Stories, which were just now (in 1845) running their popular course. A happier simplicity of style, founded on a closer familiarity, would have given fresh force to his burning indignation, and have helped the cause of Devils-dust and Dandy Mick. But the accident of stilted speech must not blind us to the sincere and glowing emotion that inspired the pictures of human suffering in Sybil.

Then followed Tancred, which, as it has always been reported, continued to the last to be the author's favourite among his literary offspring. Disraeli had little sympathy with either of the great parties which in that day governed English political life. As time went on, he became surer than ever of the degeneracy of modern society, and he began to despair of discovering any cure for it. In Tancred he laid aside in great measure his mood of satirical extravagance. The whole of this book is steeped in the colours of poetry—of poetry, that is to say, as the florid mind of Disraeli conceived it. It opens—as all his books love to open—with the chronicle of an ardent and innocent boy's career. This is commonplace, but when Tancred, who is mainly the author's customary type of young Englishman born in the purple, arrives in the Holy Land, a flush of pure romance passes over the whole texture of the narrative. Real life is forgotten, and we move in a fabulous, but intensely picturesque, world of ecstasy and dream.

The Prerogation of Judaism, as it had been laid down by Sidonia in Coningsby, is emphasised and developed, and is indeed made the central theme of the story in Tancred. This novel is inspired by an outspoken and enthusiastic respect for the Hebrew race and a perfect belief in its future. In the presence of the mighty monuments of Jerusalem, Disraeli forgets that he is a Christian and an ambitious member of the English Parliament. His only solicitude is to recover his privileges as a Jew, and to recollect that he stands in the majestic cradle of his race. He becomes interpenetrated with solemn mysticism; a wind of faith blows in his hair. He cries, "God never spoke except to an Arab," and we are therefore not surprised to find an actual Divine message presently pronounced in Tancred's ears as he stands on the summit of Mount Sinai. This is, perhaps, the boldest flight of imagination which occurs in the writings of Disraeli. Tancred endeavours to counteract the purely Hebraic influences of Palestine by making a journey of homage to Astarte, a mysterious and beautiful Pagan queen—an "Aryan," as he loves to put it—who reigns in the mountains of Syria. But even she does not encourage him to put his trust in the progress of Western Europe.

Tancred is written in Disraeli's best middle style, full, sonorous, daring, and rarely swelling into bombast. It would even be too uniformly grave if the fantastic character of Facredeen did not relieve the solemnity of the discourse with his amusing tirades. Like that of all Disraeli's novels, the close of this one is dim and unsatisfactory. If there is anything that the patient reader wants to know it is how the Duke and Duchess of Bellemont behaved to the Lady of Bethany when they arrived at Jerusalem and found their son in the kiosk under her palm-tree. But this is curiosity of a class which Disraeli is not unwilling to awaken, but which he never cares to satisfy. He places the problems in a heap before us, and he leaves us to untie the knots. It is a highly characteristic trait of his mind as a writer that he is for ever preoccupied with the beginnings of things, and as little as possible with their endings.

It is not, however, from Tancred but from Coningsby, that we take our example of Disraeli's second manner:—

"Even to catch Lord Monmouth's glance was not an easy affair; he was much occupied on one side by the great lady, on the other were several gentlemen who occasionally joined in the conversation. But something must be done.

"There ran through Coningsby's character, as we have before mentioned, a vein of simplicity which was not its least charm. It resulted, no doubt, in a great degree from the earnestness of his nature. There never was a boy so totally devoid of affectation, which was remarkable, for he had a brilliant imagination, a quality that, from its fantasies, and the vague and indefinite desires it engenders, generally makes those whose characters are not formed, affected. The Duchess, who was a fine judge of character, and who greatly regarded Coningsby, often mentioned this trait as one which, combined with his great abilities and acquirements so unusual at his age, rendered him very interesting. In the present instance it happened that, while Coningsby was watching his grandfather, he observed a gentleman advance, make his bow, say and receive a few words and retire. This little incident, however, made a momentary diversion in the immediate circle of Lord Monmouth, and before they could all resume their former talk and fall into their previous positions, an impulse sent forth Coningsby, who walked up to Lord Monmouth, and standing before him, said,

"'How do you do, grandpapa?'

"Lord Monmouth beheld his grandson. His comprehensive and penetrating glance took in every point with a flash. There stood before him one of the handsomest youths he had ever seen, with a mien as graceful as his countenance was captivating; and his whole air breathing that freshness and ingenuousness which none so much appreciates as the used man of the world. And this was his child; the only one of his blood to whom he had been kind. It would be an exaggeration to say that Lord Monmouth's heart was touched; but his good-nature effervesced, and his fine taste was deeply gratified. He perceived in an instant such a relation might be a valuable adherent; an irresistible candidate for future elections: a brilliant tool to work out the Dukedom. All these impressions and ideas, and many more, passed through the quick brain of Lord Monmouth ere the sound of Coningsby's words had seemed to cease, and long before the surrounding guests had recovered from the surprise which they had occasioned them, and which did not diminish, when Lord Monmouth, advancing, placed his arms round Coningsby with a dignity of affection that would have become Louis XIV., and then, in the high manner of the old Court, kissed him on each cheek.

"'Welcome to your home,' said Lord Monmouth. 'You have grown a great deal.'

"Then Lord Monmouth led the agitated Coningsby to the great lady, who was a Princess and an Ambassadress, and then, placing his arm gracefully in that of his grandson, he led him across the room, and presented him in due form to some royal blood that was his guest, in the shape of a Russian Grand Duke. His Imperial Highness received our hero as graciously as the grandson of Lord Monmouth might expect; but no greeting can be imagined warmer than the one he received from the lady with whom the Grand Duke was conversing. She was a dame whose beauty was mature, but still radiant. Her figure was superb; her dark hair crowned with a tiara of curious workmanship. Her rounded arm was covered with costly bracelets, but not a jewel on her finely-formed bust, and the least possible rouge on her still oval cheek. Madame Colonna retained her charms."

III

Nearly a quarter of a century passed, during which Disraeli slowly rose to the highest honours in the State. Lord Derby died, and the novelist, already Leader of the House of Commons, found himself called to be Prime Minister of England. His first administration, however, was brief, and in the last days of 1868 he resigned in favour of Mr. Gladstone. The Liberals were in for five years, and Disraeli, in opposition, found a sort of tableland stretch in front of him after so much arduous climbing. It was at this moment, shortly after the resignation of the Tory Minister, that the publisher of a magazine approached him with the request that he would write a novel to appear in its pages. He was offered, it is said, a sum of money far in excess of what any one, at that time, had ever received for "serial rights." Disraeli refused the offer, but it may have drawn his thoughts back to literature, and in the course of 1869, after the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland was completed, he found time to write what is unquestionably the greatest of his literary works—the superb ironic romance of Lothair.

Eminent as he was and eminently successful, Disraeli was far, in 1870, from having conquered public opinion in England. The reception of his new novel was noisy, and enjoyed to the full the clamours of advertisement, but it was not favourable. The critics laughed it to scorn, and called it a farce and a failure. The Quarterly Review, in the course of a savage diatribe, declared that it was "as dull as ditch-water and as flat as a flounder," and in a graver mood reproved it as a mere "bid for the bigoted voices of Exeter Hall." Some of the criticisms were not wanting in acumen. It was perceived at once that, as Theodora Campion is the heroine of the book, it was an error in art to kill her off in the middle of it. Moreover, it is only fair to admit that if the stormy Parliamentarian life Disraeli had led so long had given him immense personal advantages, it had also developed some defects. It had taught him boundless independence and courage, it had given him a rare experience of men and manners, and it had lifted his satire far above petty or narrow personal considerations. But it had encouraged a looseness of utterance, a mixture of the colloquial and the bombastic, which was unfortunate. In the best parts of Coningsby and of Tancred he had shown himself a very careless writer of English. But Lothair, even in its corrected form—and the first edition is a miracle of laxity—is curiously incorrect. It reads as though it were taken down from the flowing speech of a fine orator, not as though it were painfully composed in a study; it contains surprising ellipses, strange freaks of grammar. There was all this, and more, to encourage the critics, whom Disraeli had gone out of his way to affront in a violent epigram, to attack Lothair with contempt and resentment.

The critics took irony for timidity; they thought that the sardonic novelist was the dupe of the splendours which he invented and gloated over. But if one thing is more evident than another to-day it is that this gorgeous story of a noble boy, whose guardians, a Presbyterian earl and a Roman cardinal, quarrelled for his soul and for his acres, is an immense satire from first to last. In Disraeli's own words, used in another sense, the keynote of Lothair is "mockery blended with Ionian splendour." Never had he mocked so dauntlessly, never had his fancy been more exuberant, and those who criticise the magnificence must realise that it was intentional. It was thus that Disraeli loved to see life, and, most of all, the life he laughed at. He had always been gorgeous, but he let himself go in Lothair; all is like the dream of a Lorenzo dei Medicis or an Aurungzebe. Nothing is done by halves. Muriel Towers was set on "the largest natural lake that inland England boasts"—some lake far larger than Windermere and entirely unsuspected by geographers. This piece of water is studded with "green islands," which is natural. But the author cannot stay his hand: this largest of the English lakes is also alive with "golden gondolas," which are rarer objects. In one of the odd little flashes of self-criticism which illuminate the book Lothair says of a certain northern garden, with its fanes and its fountains, its glittering statues and its Babylonian terraces, that there are "perhaps too many temples."

There are perhaps too many temples in the landscape of Lothair, but they were put in on purpose. The splendour is part of the satire. When the hero has ordered an architect to make some plans for a building, the door opens and servants enter bearing "a large and magnificent portfolio of morocco, made of prelatial purple with broad bands of gold and alternate ornaments of a cross and a coronet." It is the sort of portfolio that Belshazzar might have used, but no English master-builder since time began ever launched forth into such splendour. This is characteristic of Disraeli and of his book; it pleased him to wrap all his fancies in jewelled cloth of gold. He chose that the world should consist of nothing but Tudor palaces in colossal parks, and that time should be no other than a perpetual Holy Week of golden ceremonial. He knew his public, and that it adored these follies. He spoke to them in the language that they loved, but in a tone of the most seraphical disdain and irony.

What marks the whole of Disraeli's writings more than any other quality is the buoyant and radiant temperament of their author. In Lothair he is like an inspired and enfranchised boy, set free from all the trammels of reality, and yet bringing to the service of his theme the results of an extraordinary inherited experience. If the picture is not real, we may take courage to say that it is far better than reality—more rich, more entertaining, more intoxicating. We have said that it is carelessly written, but that is part of the author's superb self-confidence, and when he is fortunately inspired, he obtains here an ease of style, a mastery which he had never found before. The sureness of his touch is seen in the epigrams which strew the pages of Lothair, and have become part of our habitual speech—the phrase about eating "a little fruit on a green bank with music"; that which describes the hansom cab, "'Tis the gondola of London." This may lead us on to the consideration that Disraeli is one of those who have felt most vividly and expressed most gaily the peculiar physical beauty of London. He saw the Park as the true Londoner sees it—when "the chestnuts are in silver bloom, and the pink may has flushed the thorns, and banks of sloping turf are radiant with plots of gorgeous flowers; when the water glitters in the sun, and the air is fragrant with that spell which only can be found in metropolitan mignonette." He describes as no one else has ever done with equal mastery a stately and successful house-party in a great country mansion. He had developed, when he composed Lothair, a fuller sense of beauty than he had ever possessed before, but it revelled in forms that were partly artificial and partly fabulous. An example of these forms may now be welcome:—