Views and Reviews | Page 7

agitator to an emperor. They often remind you of
Voltaire, often of Balzac, often of The Arabian Nights. You pass from
an heroic drinking bout to a brilliant criticism of style; from rhapsodies
on bands and ortolans that remind you of Heine to a gambling scene
that for directness and intensity may vie with the bluntest and strongest
work of Prosper Merimee; from the extravagant impudence of
Popanilla to the sentimental rodomontade of Henrietta Temple; from
ranting romanticism in Alroy to vivid realism in Sybil. Their author
gives you no time to weary of him, for he is worldly and passionate,

fantastic and trenchant, cynical and ambitious, flippant and sentimental,
ornately rhetorical and triumphantly simple in a breath. He is
imperiously egoistic, but while constantly parading his own personality
he is careful never to tell you anything about it. And withal he is
imperturbably good-tempered: he brands and gibbets with a smile, and
with a smile he adores and applauds. Intellectually he is in sympathy
with character of every sort; he writes as becomes an artist who has
recognised that 'the conduct of men depends upon the temperament, not
upon a bunch of musty maxims,' and that 'there is a great deal of vice
that is really sheer inadvertence.' It is said that the Monmouth of
Coningsby and the Steyne of Vanity Fair are painted from one and the
same original; and you have but to compare the savage realism of
Thackeray's study to the scornful amenity of the other's--as you have
but to contrast the elaborate and extravagant cruelty of Thackeray's
Alcide de Mirobolant with the polite and half-respectful irony of
Disraeli's treatment of the cooks in Tancred--to perceive that in certain
ways the advantage is not with 'the greatest novelist of his time,' and
that the Monmouth produces an impression which is more moral
because more kindly and humane than the impression left by the Steyne,
while in its way it is every whit as vivid and as convincing. Yet another
excellence, and a great one, is his mastery of apt and forcible dialogue.
The talk of Mr. Henry James's personages is charmingly equable and
appropriate, but it is also trivial and tame; the talk in Anthony Trollope
is surprisingly natural and abundant, but it is also commonplace and
immemorable; the talk of Mr. George Meredith is always eloquent and
fanciful, but the eloquence is too often dark and the fancy too
commonly inhuman. What Disraeli's people have to say is not always
original nor profound, but it is crisply and happily phrased and uttered,
it reads well, its impression seldom fails of permanency. His Wit and
Wisdom is a kind of Talker's Guide or Handbook of Conversation. How
should it be otherwise, seeing that it contains the characteristic
utterances of a great artist in life renowned for memorable speech?

A Contrast.
Now, if you ask a worshipper of him that was so long his rival, to

repeat a saying, a maxim, a sentence, of which his idol is the author, it
is odds but he will look like a fool, and visit you with an evasive
answer. What else should he do? His deity is a man of many words and
no sayings. He is the prince of agitators, but it would be impossible for
him to mint a definition of 'agitation'; he is the world's most eloquent
arithmetician, but it is beyond him to epigrammatise the fact that two
and two make four. And it seems certain, unless the study of Homer
and religious fiction inspire him to some purpose, that his contributions
to axiomatic literature will be still restricted to the remark that 'There
are three courses open' to something or other: to the House, to the angry
cabman, to what and whomsoever you will. In sober truth, he is one
who writes for to-day, and takes no thought of either yesterdays or
morrows. For him the Future is next session; the Past does not extend
beyond his last change of mind. He is a prince of journalists, and his
excursions into monthly literature remain to show how great and
copious a master of the 'leader'--ornate, imposing, absolutely
insignificant--his absorption in politics has cost the English-speaking
world.

His Backgrounds.
Disraeli's imagination, at once practical and extravagant, is not of the
kind that delights in plot and counterplot. His novels abound in action,
but the episodes wear a more or less random look: the impression
produced is pretty much that of a story of adventure. But if they fail as
stories they are unexceptionable as canvases. Our author unrolls them
with superb audacity; and rapidly and vigorously he fills them in with
places and people, with faces that are as life and words expressive even
as they. Nothing is too lofty or too low for him.