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 Rogers144 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 Hooks150 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 Meredith151 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 adventures152—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 Shelley157—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 Croesus, 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 present168 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.’”

DISRAELI IN 1852

After a painting by Sir Francis Grant, P.R.A.