and here his son Benjamin also had their acquaintance and conversation. In Bloomsbury Square lived the Austens, and to their house, a great resort of similar persons, Mrs Austen cordially welcomed him. Murray’s friendship and associations helped him in like manner, no doubt; and thus was opened to Disraeli the younger a world in which he was to make a considerable stir. The very much smaller society of that day was, of course, more comprehensible to sight and hearing, when once you were within its borders, than the society of this. Reverberations of the gossip of St James’s and Mayfair extended to Bloomsbury in those days. Yet Disraeli’s range of observation “Vivan Grey.”must have been not only brief but limited when he sat down at twenty or twenty-one to write Vivian Grey. It is therefore a probable conjecture that Mrs Austen, a clever woman of the world, helped him from her knowledge. His own strongly perceptive imagination (the gift in which he was to excel every other politician of his time) and the bent of political reading and aspiration from boyhood completed his equipment; and so the wonder that so young a man in Disraeli’s social position should write a book like Vivian Grey is accounted for. It was published in 1826. The success of this insolently clever novel, the immediate introduction of its author to the great world, and the daring eccentricities of dress, demeanour, and opinion by which he fixed attention on himself there, have always been among the most favourite morsels of Disraeli’s history. With them it began, and successive generations of inquirers into a strange career and a character still shrouded and baffling refer to them as settled starting-points of investigation. What was the man who, in such a society and with political aspirations to serve, could thrive by such vagaries as these, or in spite of them? If unaffected, what is to be thought of them as keys to character? If affected, what then? Inquiry still takes this shape, and when any part of Disraeli’s career is studied, the laces and essences, the rings over gloves, the jewelled satin shirt-fronts, the guitareries and chibouqueries of his early days are never remote from memory. The report of them can hardly be doubted; and as the last relation was made (to the writer of this article) not with intent to ridicule Mr Disraeli’s taste but to illustrate his conquering abilities, the story is repeated here. One of Disraeli’s first friends in the world of fashion and genius was Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer. “And,” said Sir Henry Bulwer (“Pelham’s” brother), “we heard so much at the time of Edward’s amazingly brilliant new friend that we were the less inclined to make his acquaintance.” At length, however, Sir Edward got up a little dinner-party to convince the doubters. It was to meet at the early hour of those days at one of the Piccadilly hotels. “There was my brother, Alexander Cockburn, myself and (I think) Milnes; but for a considerable time no Mr Disraeli. Waiting for Mr Disraeli did not enhance the pleasure of meeting him, nor when he did arrive did his appearance predispose us in his favour. He wore green velvet trousers, a canary-coloured waistcoat, low shoes, silver buckles, lace at his wrists, and his hair in ringlets.” The description of the coat is forgotten. “We sat down. Not one of us was more than five-and-twenty years old. We were all—if you will allow me to include myself—on the road to distinction, all clever, all ambitious, and all with a perfect conceit of ourselves. Yet if on leaving the table we had been severally taken aside and asked which was the cleverest of the party, we should have been obliged to say ‘the man in the green velvet trousers.’” This story is a little lamp that throws much light. Here we see at their sharpest the social prejudices that Disraeli had to fight against, provocation of them carried to its utmost in every way open to him, and complete conquest in a company of young men less likely to admit superiority in a wit of their own years, probably, than any other that could have been brought together at that time.
Soon after the publication of Vivian Grey, Disraeli, who is said by Froude to have been “overtaken by a singular disorder,” marked by fits of giddiness (“once he fell into a trance, and did not recover for a week”), went with the Austens on a long summer tour in France, Switzerland and Italy. Returning to a quiet life at Bradenham—an old manor-house near High Wycombe, which his father had taken—Disraeli put law in abeyance and resumed novel-writing. His weakest book, and two or three other productions, brief, but in every literary sense the finest of his works, were written in the next two or three years. But for Ixion in Heaven, The Infernal Marriage, and Popanilla, Disraeli could not be placed among the greater writers of his kind; yet none of his imaginative books have been so little read as these. The mysterious malady continued, and Disraeli set out with William Travel.Meredith, who was to have married Sarah Disraeli, for a tour in southern Europe and the nearer East. He saw Cadiz, Seville, Granada, Athens, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Cairo, Thebes; played the corsair with James Clay on a yacht voyage from Malta to Corfu; visited the terrible Reschid, then with a Turkish army in the Albanian capital; landed in Cyprus, and left it with an expectation in his singularly prescient mind that the island would one day be English. These travels must have profited him greatly, and we have our share of the advantage; not so much, however, in The Wondrous Tale of Alroy or Tancred, or the “Revolutionary Epic” which he was inspired to write on “the windy plains of Troy,” but in the letters he sent home to his sister. These letters, written with the utmost freedom and fullness to the one whose affection and intellect he trusted more than any, are of the greatest value for interpreting the writer. Together with other letters also published some time after Disraeli’s death, they tell more of him than anything that can be found in print elsewhere. They show, for example, that his extraordinary exuberances were unforced, leaping by natural impulse from an overcharged source. They also show that his Oriental fopperies were not so much “purposed affectation” as Froude and others have surmised. That they were so in great part is confessed again and again in these letters, but confessed in such a way as to reveal that they were permitted for his own enjoyment of them as much as planned. The “purposed affectation” sprang from an unaffected delight in gauds of attire, gauds of fancy and expression. It was not only to startle and impress the world that he paraded his eccentricities of splendour. His family also had to be impressed by them. It was to his sober father that he wrote, at the age of twenty-six: “I like a sailor’s life much, though it spoils the toilette.” It is in a letter from Gibraltar to the same hand that we read of his two canes—“a morning and an evening cane”—changed as the gun fires. And the same correspondent must be told that “Ralph’s handkerchief which he brought me from Paris is the most successful thing I ever wore.”
When Disraeli returned to England in 1831, all thought of the law was abandoned. The pen of romance was again taken up—the poet’s also and the politician’s. In the next five years he wrote Contarini Fleming, the Revolutionary Epick, Alroy, Henrietta Temple, What is He? (a Literary production.pamphlet expository of his opinions), the Runnymede Letters, a Vindication of the British Constitution, and other matter of less note. The epic, begun in great hope and confidence, was ended in less, though its author was to the last unwilling that it should be forgotten. The novels revived the success he had with Vivian Grey, and restored him to his place among the brilliancies and powers of the time. The political writing, too, much of it in a garish, extravagant style, exercised his deeper ambitions, and stands as witness to the working of original thought and foresight. Both qualities are conspicuous in What is He? and the Vindication, of which it has been truly said that in these pages he “struck the keynote to the explanations he afterwards consistently offered of all his apparent inconsistencies.” Here an interpretation of Tory principles as capable of running with the democratic idea, and as called upon to do so, is ingeniously attempted. The aristocratic principle of government having been destroyed by the Reform Bill, and the House of Lords being practically “abrogated” by that measure, it became necessary that Toryism should start from the democratic basis, from which it had never been alien. The filched liberties of the crown and the people should be restored, and the nation redeemed from the oligarchies which had stolen from both. When at the beginning of all this
