English Lands Letters and Kings 18

English Lands Letters and Kings 18

Young Bulwer and Disraeli._

 

It was some years before the passage of the Reform bill, and before the

death of George IV., that Bulwer[57] blazed out in _Pelham_ (1828), _The

Disowned_, and _Devereux_, making conquest of the novel-reading town, at a

time when _Quentin Durward_ (1823) was not an old book, and _Woodstock_

(1826) still fresh. And if Pelhamism had its speedy subsidence, the same

writer put such captivating historic garniture and literary graces about

the Italian studies of _Rienzi_, and of the _Last Days of Pompeii_, as

carry them now into most libraries, and insure an interested

reading--notwithstanding a strong sensuous taint and sentimental

extravagances.

 

He had scholarship; he had indefatigable industry; he had abounding

literary ambitions and enthusiasms, but he had no humor; I am afraid he

had not a very sensitive conscience; and he had no such pervading

refinement of literary taste as to make his work serve as the exemplar for

other and honester workers.

 

Benjamin Disraeli[58] in those days overmatched him in cravats and in

waistcoats, and was the veriest fop of all fop-land. No more beautiful

accessory could be imagined to the drawing-room receptions over which Lady

Blessington presided, and of which the ineffable Comte d’Orsay was a

shining and a fixed light, than this young Hebraic scion of a great Judean

house--whose curls were of the color of a raven’s wing, and whose satin

trumpery was ravishing!

 

And yet--this young foppish Disraeli, within fifty years, held the

destinies of Great Britain in his hand, and had endowed the Queen with the

grandest title she had ever worn--that of Empress of India. Still further,

in virtue of his old friendship for his fellow fop Bulwer, he sends the

son of that novelist (in the person of the second Lord Lytton) to preside

over a nation numbering two hundred millions of souls. Whoever can

accomplish these ends with such a people as that of Great Britain must

needs have something in him beyond mere fitness for the pretty salons of

my Lady Blessington.

 

And what was it? Whatever you may count it, there is surely warrant for

telling you something of his history and his antecedents: Three or more

centuries ago--at the very least--a certain Jew of Cordova, in Spain,

driven out by the terrors of the Inquisition, went to Venice--established

himself there in merchandise, and his family throve there for two hundred

years. A century and a half ago,--when the fortunes of Venice were plainly

on the wane--the head of this Jewish family--Benjamin Disraeli

(grandfather of the one of whom we speak) migrated to England. This first

English Benjamin met with success on the Exchange of London, and owing to

the influences of his wife (who hated all Jewry) he discarded his

religious connection with Hebraism, went to the town of Enfield, a little

north of London--with a good fortune, and lived there the life of a

retired country gentleman. He had a son Isaac, who devoted himself to the

study of literature, and showed early strong bookish proclivities--very

much to the grief of his father, who had a shrewd contempt for all such

follies. Yet the son Isaac persisted, and did little else through a long

life, save to prosecute inquiries about the struggles of authors and the

lives of authors and the work of authors--all ending in that agglomeration

which we know as the _Curiosities of Literature_--a book which sixty years

since used to be reckoned a necessary part of all well-equipped

libraries; but which--to tell truth--has very little value; being without

any method, without fulness, and without much accuracy. It is very rare

that so poor a book gets so good a name, and wears it so long.

 

Oddly enough, this father, who had devoted a life to the mere gossip of

literature, as it were, warns his son Benjamin against literary pursuits

(he wrote three or four novels indeed,[59] but they are never heard of),

and the son studied mostly under private tutors; there is no full or

trustworthy private biography of him: but we know that in the years

1826-1827--only a short time before the Lady Blessington coterie was in

its best feather--he wrote a novel called _Vivian Grey_,--the author being

then under twenty-two--which for a time divided attention with _Pelham_.

In club circles it made even more talk. It is full of pictures of people

of the day; Brougham and Wilson Croker, and Southey, and George Canning,

and Mrs. Coutts and Lady Melbourne (Caroline Lamb), all figure in it. He

never gave over, indeed, putting portraits in his books--as Goldwin Smith

can tell us. The larger Reviews were coy of praise and coy of

condemnation: indeed ’twas hard to say which way it pointed--socially or

politically; but, for the scandal-mongers, there was in it very appetizing

meat. He became a lion of the salons; and he enjoyed the lionhood vastly.

Chalon[60] painted him in that day--a very Adonis--gorgeous in velvet coat

and in ruffled shirt.

 

But he grew tired of England and made his trip of travel; it followed by

nearly a score of years after that of Childe Harold, and was doubtless

largely stimulated by it; three years he was gone--wandering over all the

East, as well as Europe. He came back with an epic (published 1834),

believing that it was to fill men’s minds, and to conquer a place for him

among the great poets of the century. In this he was dismally mistaken; so

he broke his lyre, and that was virtually the last of his poesy. There

came, however, out of these journeyings, besides the poem, the stories of

_Contarini Fleming_, of _The Young Duke_, and _The Wondrous Tale of

Alroy_. These kept his fame alive, but seemed after all only the work of a

man playing with literature, rather than of one in earnest.

 

With ambition well sharpened now, by what he counted neglect, he turned to

politics; as the son of a country gentleman of easy fortune, it was not

difficult to make place for himself. Yet, with all the traditions of a

country gentleman about him, in his first moves he was not inclined to

Toryism; indeed, he startled friends by his radicalism--was inclined to

shake hands at the outset with the arch-agitator O’Connell; but not

identifying himself closely with either party; and so, to the last it

happened that his sympathies were halved in most extraordinary way; he had

the concurrence of the most staid, Toryish, and conservative of country

voters; and no man could, like himself, bring all the jingoes of England

howling at his back. Indeed, nothing is more remarkable in his career than

his shrewd adaptation of policy to meet existing, or approaching tides of

feeling; he does not avow great convictions of duty, and stand by them;

but he toys with convictions; studies the weakness, as he does the power,

of those with him or against him; shifts his ground accordingly; rarely

lacking poise, and the attitude of seeming steadfastness; whipping with

his scourge of a tongue the little lapses of his adversaries till they

shrill all over the kingdom; and putting his own triumphs--great or

small--into such scenic combination, with such beat of drum, and blare of

trumpet, as to make all England break out into bravos.[61] There was not

that literary quality in his books, either early or late, which will give

to them, I think, a very long life; but there was in the man a quality of

shrewdness and of power which will be long remembered--perhaps not always

to his honor.

 

I do not yield to any in admiration for the noble and philanthropic

qualities which belong to the venerable, retired statesman of Hawarden;

yet I cannot help thinking that if such a firm and audacious executive

hand as belonged to Lord Beaconsfield, had--in the season of General

Gordon’s stress at Khartoum--controlled the fleets and armies of Great

Britain, there would have been quite other outcome to the sad imbroglio in

the Soudan. When war is afoot, the apostles of peace are the poorest of

directors.

 

I go back for a moment to that Blessington Salon--in order to close her

story. There was a narrowed income--a failure of her jointure--a

shortening of her book sales; but, notwithstanding, there was a long

struggle to keep that brilliant little court alive. One grows to like so

much the music and the fêtes and the glitter of the chandeliers, and the

unction of flattering voices! But at last the ruin came; on a sudden the

sheriffs were there; and clerks with their inventories in place of the

“Tokens” and “annuals”--with their gorgeous engravings by Finden &

Heath--which the Mistress had exploited; and she hurried off--after the

elegant D’Orsay--to Paris, hoping to rehabilitate herself, on the Champs

Elysées, under the wing of Louis Napoleon, just elected President. I

chanced to see her in her coupé there, on a bright afternoon early in

1849--with elegant silken wraps about her and a shimmer of the old kindly

smile upon her shrunken face--dashing out to the Bois; but within three

months there was another sharp change; she--dead, and her pretty

_decolleté_ court at an end forever.

 

 

_The Poet of Newstead._

 

The reminiscences and conversations of Lord Byron, which we have at the

hands of Lady Blessington, belong to a time, of course, much earlier than

her series of London triumphs, and date with her journeys in Italy. A

score of years at least before ever the chandeliers of her Irish ladyship

were lighted in Gore House, Byron[62] had gone sailing away from England

under a storm of wrath; and he never came back again. Indeed it is not a

little extraordinary that one of the most typical of English poets,

should--like Landor, with whom he had many traits in common--have passed

so little of his active life on English ground. Like Landor, he loved

England most when England was most behind him. Like Landor, he was gifted

with such rare powers as belonged to few Englishmen of that generation. In

Landor these powers, so far as they expressed themselves in literary form,

were kept in check by the iron rulings of a scrupulous and exacting

craftsmanship; while in Byron they broke all trammels, whether of

craftsmanship or reason, and glowed and blazed the more by reason of their

audacities. Both were prone to great tempests of wrath which gave to both

furious joys, and, I think, as furious regrets.

 

Byron came by his wrathfulness in good hereditary fashion--as we shall

find if we look back only a little way into the records of that Newstead

family. Newstead Abbey (more properly Priory, the archæologists tell us)

is the name of that great English home--half a ruin--associated with the

early years of the poet, but never for much time or in any true sense a

home of his own. It is some ten miles north of Nottingham, in an

interesting country, where lay the old Sherwood Forest, with its

traditions of Robin Hood; there is a lichened Gothic front which explains

the Abbey name; there are great rambling corridors and halls; there is a

velvety lawn, with the monument to “Boatswain,” the poet’s dog; but one

who goes there--with however much of Byronic reading in his or her

mind--will not, I think, warm toward the locality; and the curious

foot-traveller will incline to trudge away in a hunt for Annesley, and the

“Antique Oratory.”

 

Well, in that ancient home, toward the end of the last century, there

lived, very much by himself, an old Lord Byron, who some thirty years

before, in a fit of wild rage, had killed a neighbor and kinsman of the

name of Chaworth; there was indeed a little show of a duel about the

murder--which was done in a London tavern, and by candle-light. His

peerage, however, only saved this “wicked lord,” as he was called, from

prison; and at Newstead his life smouldered out in 1798, under clouds of

hate, and of distrust. His son was dead before him; so was his grandson,

the last heir in direct line; but he had a younger brother, John, who was

a great seaman--who published accounts of his voyages,[63] which seem

always to have been stormy, and which lend, maybe, some realistic touches

to the shipwreck scenes in “Don Juan.” A son of this voyager was the

father of the poet, and was reputed to be as full of wrath and turbulence

as his uncle who killed the Chaworth; and his life was as thick with

disaster as that of the unlucky voyager. His first marriage was a runaway

one with a titled lady, whose heart he broke, and who died leaving that

lone daughter who became the most worthy Lady Augusta Leigh. For second

wife he married Miss Gordon, a Scotch heiress, the mother of the poet,

whose fortune he squandered, and whose heart also he would have broken--if

it had been of a breaking quality. With such foregoers of his own name,

one might look for bad blood in the boy; nor was his mother saint-like;

she had her storms of wrath; and from the beginning, I think, gave her boy

only cruel milk to drink.

 

His extreme boyhood was passed near to Aberdeen, with the Highlands not

far off. How much those scenes impressed him, we do not know; but that

some trace was left may be found in verses written near his death:--

 

“He who first met the Highland’s swelling blue

Will love each peak that shows a kindred hue;

Hail in each crag a friend’s familiar face

And clasp the mountain in his mind’s embrace.”