The book is founded on the assumption that with Youth at the prow and Pleasure at the helm, Youth will pretty soon be on the rocks. It is a moral lesson smuggled to the reader under the guise of amusement.
As a novel, Pelham is constantly amusing, at least in its early portions, by the ceaseless vivacity of malicious incident.
Mr. Conway had just caused two divorces; and of course all the women in London were dying for him—judge then of the pride which Lady Frances felt at his addresses. The end of the season was unusually dull, and my mother, after having looked over her list of engagements, and ascertaining that she had none remaining worth staying for, agreed to elope with her new lover.
The carriage was at the end of the square. My mother, for the first time in her life, got up at six o’clock. Her foot was on the step, and her hand next to Mr. Conway’s heart, when she remembered that her favourite china monster, and her French dog, were left behind. She insisted on returning—re-entered the house, and was coming downstairs with one under each arm, when she was met by my father and two servants. My father’s valet had discovered the flight (I forget how), and awakened his master.
When my father was convinced of his loss, he called for his dressing-gown—searched the garret and the kitchen—looked in the maids’ drawers and the cellaret—and finally declared he was distracted. I have heard that the servants were quite melted by his grief, and I do not doubt it in the least, for he was always celebrated for his skill in private theatricals.
Or:
I think at this moment I see my mother before me, reclining on the sofa, repeating to me some story about Queen Elizabeth and Lord Essex; then telling me, in a languid voice, as she sank back with the exertion, of the blessings of a literary taste, and admonishing me never to read above half an hour at a time for fear of losing my health.
The charm of this method of writing lies in the lively heartlessness that infects it. Unfortunately, it infected Lytton, too, in places. And his spiteful pleasantries sometimes lose their pleasantness in a sweating attack of comic disillusion:
I was in her boudoir one evening, when her femme de chambre came to tell us that the duc was in the passage. Notwithstanding the innocence of our attachment, the duchesse was in a violent fright; a small door was at the left of the ottoman on which we were sitting. “Oh, no, no, not there,” cried the lady; but I saw no other refuge, entered it forthwith, and before she could ferret me out, the duc was in the room.
In the meanwhile, I amused myself by examining the wonders of the new world into which I had so abruptly immerged: on a small table before me, was deposited a remarkably constructed night-cap; I examined it as a curiosity; on each side was placed une petite côtelette de veau cru, sewed on with green-coloured silk (I remember even the smallest minutiæ); a beautiful golden wig (the duchesse never liked me to play with her hair) was on a block close by, and on another table was a set of teeth d’une blancheur éblouissante.
A passage like that explains why it was that Lytton was never able to draw the romantic portraits of heroines that his historical novels, The Last Days of Pompeii; Harold, Last of the Saxon Kings; Rienzi, and the rest of the yearning and magnificent tributes to vanished greatness, demanded. He became the historical novelist of his age, wonderfully well-read, pompously perfect in every line and paragraph, when he should have become rather a kind of dignified and disinfected Oscar Wilde; a poseur ridiculing all poses but his own.
He took himself, naturally, as seriously as a judge. He moved in the best circles of Paris and London with a supreme sense of his own talents and importance. He lived in an age when it was fashionable to be clever; and Lytton was a leader of fashion. He wrote fiction in much the manner in which an Elizabethan youth of the same distinction of intellect would have written poetry; because his mind was both alive with thoughts and respectful of the prevailing conventions.
A few years earlier, and he would have written elegant and expert Don Juanish verses. As it was, he came into a world that was growing tired of Don Juans. So he dressed his Pelhams and Clintons in the complete uniform of Byronism, and then just carted them about in his books like Guys ready for the burning. There is an opulent tawdriness about Lytton’s world in which the mad, bad characters of an earlier age move in a new serious world of virtue.
Lytton, indeed, stands midway between the age of the libertine and the era of the evangelical Liberal; between the Byronic open shirt and the Gladstone collar.
There was, however, another reason than convention for Lytton’s writing novels; and that was marriage. Lytton, with the remarkable misguidance of heart which has distinguished most of the English novelists, married the wrong woman. He broke with his mother—who was also his banker—to marry a tragic wife, who after the birth of two children separated from him and with insane perseverance tried to ruin his life. His mother disapproved of the match from the start, and stopped his allowance. Thus, in the early years, it was necessary for him to write to support a home. And in the later years he wrote, just as he flung himself into politics, because, with no home life to provide the normal comforts of a man’s life, he needed some distraction for his mind.
He was a man isolated by his own cleverness; and further removed from the ordinary conduct of life by his unexceptionable breeding. He was a man of too good manners; and, too many of them. And after middle-age he became rather like an expensive, polished lectern; golden, standing alone, and magnificently glittering.
Bulwer Lytton was just a little too clever to surrender his mind to the common business of life long enough to write a novel of ordinary human sincerity and, therefore, of ordinary human appeal and endurance.
Benjamin Disraeli, throughout his life was another who was the victim of a morbidly enlarged intelligence. But he was a Jew; and a Jew is naturally more comfortable in his own cleverness.
His intelligence would never have been an embarrassment to him if he had not chosen to ally himself to the one political party that distrusts cleverness. He was, it should be remembered, born in an age when the qualifications for a successful political career were strikingly unlike those of to-day. It would be a parody of a perfectly serious and sincere politician to suggest that Disraeli was simply a Lyttonesque exquisite from some unmentioned, unmentionable ghetto, gloriously declaiming with more than Christian cleverness and less than English reserve. Indeed, in Sybil Disraeli flings facts, of the unpleasant kind that have to be faced, at us as though he were a novelist-with-a-purpose who cared less for literary form than for the formula of his convictions.
But to say that Disraeli invented the political novel is to mean something very different from what the same words would imply to-day. In Coningsby Disraeli approached the political world in the spirit of carnival. Balls, breakfasts, steeplechases, hunt-suppers, salons—such was the political laboratory in which he and Coningsby worked. There is always a smattering of the ambassador—braid, white gloves, wit, and an expression of Chinese wisdom—about the writer of Disraeli’s novels. The mind of the reader moves perpetually on thick carpets and smooth floors. The clarets and champagnes make poets of politicians. The natural eloquence, the fatal, fulsome eloquence, of the author adds excess to the luxury of the scene. Even breakfast tables look as though furnished by Drage.
The breakfast room at Brentham was very bright. It opened on a garden of its own, which at this season was so glowing, and cultured into patterns so fanciful and finished, that it had the resemblance of a vast mosaic. The walls of the chamber were covered with bright drawings and sketches of our modern masters and frames of interesting miniatures ….
It is a pity, indeed, that so much of Disraeli’s fiction should support the Gladstonian view of the inspired flunkey. But, undeniably, it does so. Half the descriptions of characters are like those of a man who knows people intimately by appearance but has never met them on terms of even casual acquaintance. All the pageantry of the social scene is there and it is soon obvious that the author has not even begun to be interested in his cha
racters as they exist off the stage. Thus:
The guests reassembled in the great saloon before they repaired to the theatre. A lady on the arm of a Russian prince bestowed on Coningsby a haughty, but not ungracious, bow; which he returned, unconscious of the person to whom he bent. She was, however, a very striking person: not beautiful; her face indeed at the first glance was almost repulsive, yet it ever attracted a second gaze. A remarkable pallor distinguished her; her features had neither regularity nor expression; neither were her eyes fine; but her brow impressed you with an idea of power of no ordinary character or capacity. Her figure was as fine and commanding as her face was void of charm. Juno, in the full bloom of her immortality could have presented nothing more majestic. Coningsby watched her as she swept along like a resistless fate.
All that character and pallor (and padding) and not a hint of the implications until we arrive at the last sentence ! And that is not all. Such a sentence as that about Juno gives a hint of the worst of Disraeli’s weaknesses; his fatal tendency to gush.
There is a kind of facile fatuity about Disraeli’s method of opening a chapter that is fatal to anything that follows on it. “What wonderful things are events! The least are of greater importance than the most sublime and comprehensive speculations! ” —a remark that should be decorated in acknowledgment of its mature idiocy—or, “There are few things more full of delight and splendour, than to travel during the heat of a refulgent summer in the green district of some ancient forest,” such are the too lavishly lubricated Disraelian openings.
There probably never was a generation that has found it harder to take Disraeli’s fashion of prose seriously than our own. As we see him in his novels he is like a small thinking fly ever getting caught in a tangled web of extravagant description. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has compared this glamour with the magic of the Arabian Nights; a legacy of the world that lies east of England. But I am not sure that it is the luxury of sensation in the picturesque metaphors that affect us unfavourably, so much as their incredible ineptness. For example:
Farther on the fruit trees caught the splendour of the night; and looked like a troop of sultanas taking their garden air, where the eye of man could not profane them. There were apples that rivalled rubies; pears of topaz tint; a whole paraphernalia of plums, some purple as the amethyst, others blue and brilliant as the sapphire; an emerald here, and now a yellow drop that gleamed like the yellow diamond of Gengis Khan.
A man who pretends that he cannot tell the difference between an orchard and a harem is either a fool or a fraud. It is not to be wondered at that the rural electors of Bucks rejected Disraeli at his first attempt if he spoke about their farms and holdings in such terms. To an English mind there is something pathetically silly in the notion of an expatriated Jew trying to make the sight of an English orchard by moonlight presentable to his own imagination by putting a jeweller’s price on every pear and apple; by dangling a carat before his long, donkey’s nose.
But when all the stuffing has been knocked out of this over-stuffed book, Sybil remains a powerful and intelligent novel. In intention, it is considerably larger than most of the novels of that day or of ours. Its object was to unite the lives of men with the events of the time; it was the Chartists’ Charter.
Where it came nearest to failure was on the human side, not on the historic. Sybil herself is simply a china statuette with streaming eyes. The march of the Chartists is described with the full impetuous sweep of urgent and excited narrative. In the alarm of the moment the author finds his head and his feet, forgets that he is Dizzy, and makes straight at his goal.
The march of Bishop Hatton at the head of the Hellcats into the mining districts was perhaps the most strikingly popular movement since the Pilgrimage of Grace. Mounted on a white mule, wall-eyed and of hideous form, the Bishop brandished a huge hammer with which he had announced that he would destroy the enemies of the people: all butties, doggies, dealers in truck and tommy, middle masters and main masters. Some thousand Hell-cats followed him, brandishing bludgeons, or armed with bars of iron, pick-handles, and hammers. On each side of the Bishop, on a donkey, was one of his little sons, as demure and earnest as if he were handling his file. A flowing standard of silk, inscribed with the Charter, and which had been presented to him by the delegate, was borne before him like the oriflamme. Never was such a gaunt, grim crew. As they advanced, their numbers continually increased, for they arrested all labour in their progress. Every engine was stopped, the plug was driven out of every boiler, every fire was extinguished, every man was turned out. The decree went forth that labour was to cease until the Charter was the law of the land: the mine and the mill, the foundry and the loomshop were, until the consummation, to be idle: nor was the mighty pause to be confined to these great enterprises. Every trade of every kind and description was to be stopped: tailor and cobbler, brushmaker and sweep, tinker and carter, mason and builder, all, all; for all an enormous Sabbath, that was to compensate for any incidental suffering which it induced by the increased means and the elevated condition that it ultimately would insure; that paradise of artisans, that Utopia of Toil, embalmed in those ringing words, sounds cheerful to the Saxon race: “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.”
If Disraeli could always have written like that, he would have taken his place alongside the virile novelists of the language. But the trouble is that an interest in events, without an equal interest in the individual actors, makes poor fiction. And Disraeli never invented a character sufficiently satisfying to convince even himself.
In his most nearly successful novel, Coningsby, he simply pinned new names on well-known backs, and stood to one side to watch the fun. The weakness of the method is obvious: once the well-known men are dead and forgotten the reader has to go through the book with a key to the characters at his elbow to ensure that he is getting all of portraiture, all of scandal and all of impudence that the book has to offer.
Politics was the Disraelian substitute for philosophy. He saw the whole of life in terms of governments and downfalls of governments. Those of his books that do not point towards Westminster are completely forgotten. In the collected edition of his works, he describes how as a child “born in a library and trained from early childhood by learned men,” he grew to survey the political scene from a scholar’s perch. And he remarks that “what most attracted my musing, even as a boy, was the elements of our political parties, and the strange mystification by which that which was natural in its constitution had become odious, and that which was exclusive was presented as popular.”
We can disregard the two obvious facts that compared with Gladstone, who really was a scholar, Disraeli, so far as learning went, was simply an undergraduate with a flower in his buttonhole, and that to say that Whigs were odious and Tories popular was either a purely temporary or else a prejudiced opinion. But prejudiced or ephemeral it was Disraeli’s political faith.
Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred form an imposing philosophic trilogy, which Disraeli really believed presented a picture of the whole of English society. They presented the picture as seen through the eyes of an alert foreigner. Actually they presented a far better picture of Disraeli, cunning, inspired and anxiously trying to dig a hole in which to take root in English soil.
Meredith and Hardy
We now come upon a pair of novelists, men of the first rank, Meredith and Hardy, who had much in common, yet whose resemblances serve merely to throw their dissimilarity into sharper relief.
They were like two men travelling along the same road at the same time, one on the way to an everlasting wedding feast, the other on the way to bury the baby. They were both writers who saw life in the large terms of poetry. But one was lyrical, the other epical. One was radiantly cheerful. The other unremittingly tragic; we might almost say inevitably tragic, for extend a lyric and you generally find a tragedy.
One was on good terms with the universe; the other as soured in his writing as though God had trodden on him and not apol
ogised. Meredith would have said that creation was on his side; or at least, that he was on the side of creation. Hardy suffered grave doubts as to whether creation were not actually cruel in creating anyone.
Both writers were unchristian, or anti-christian; though remembering the age in which they lived, it is something—like measles in an epidemic—that one would hesitate to adduce as evidence of any fundamental originality. A violently anti-christian, or atheistic novelist, nowadays, would be worth any amount of individual notice; like an industriously enthusiastic Israelite uselessly making an eighth round of the walls of Jericho.
That Meredith was a novelist at all is astonishing. There is so much that is commonplace in the greatest of novels—indeed a novel scarcely can be great without a lot of the ordinary business of life in its pages—that to see Meredith turn novelist is rather like seeing a tightrope walker earning his living by carrying hods of bricks across a builder’s plank.
Meredith was a poet of remarkable lambency of emotion. And a philosopher of quite inchoate philosophy. He had in him the makings of a far more uniformly successful poet than novelist. But there were fewer interested in that kind of success, and Meredith shrank from neglect with a most unphilosophic instinctiveness.
Meredith, indeed, is one of the most unnatural novelists in the language. He had—at least in his early years—an impetuous load of things to say, but the manner he adopted of saying them was anything but the novelist’s. Wilde remarked that “as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story.” And Meredith certainly seems in places to keep up a running fight between his philosophy and his fiction, between himself and his characters.
The Facts of Fiction Page 17
