though he neglected nothing in the fashioning of the man who would one day stand before the world as Benjamin Disraeli. 'The Representative' pointed out the path which the man of affairs must take. His famous journey to the East quickened his fancy, and showed him how the stern realities of foreign policy might be coloured by romance. But before he set forth, like another Bacchus, to conquer the Orient, he was destined to traverse an arid desert of despondency. It was as though two years had been blotted from his life. He himself was perfectly conscious of disaster. "I am at present quite idle," he wrote to Sharon Turner, "being at this moment slowly recovering from one of those tremendous disorganisations which happen to all men at some period of their lives, and which are perhaps equally necessary for the formation of both body and constitution." With his rapid intelligence Disraeli discovered good in the evil, and went forth to seek health with a high courage. That he should turn his face eastwards was natural enough. He believed devoutly that "all is race," and piety persuaded him to travel towards the rising sun in search of the cradle of his tribe. Moreover, the influence of Byron was at its height, and Byronism was in the very blood of Disraeli. Thus everything conspired to make this journey to the East the turning-point of his career. raeli wrote nothing afterwards that was not touched by its Dis influence. There is no doubt whatever that the Eastern questions, to which he devoted so much of his thought and policy, would have found a very different solution had not Disraeli set out with Meredith in 1830 to see the world. The admirable letters, in which he described his travels, were published long since. But familiarity cannot stale them. They are as fresh and vivid today as on the day when they were written. An immortal gaiety informs them. Every line bears the impress of selfsatisfaction. The author takes it for granted that to him at least the last excess of coxcombry is permitted. At Gibraltar he had "the fame of being the first who ever passed the Straits with two canes, a morning and an evening cane. I change my cane the gun fires, and hope to carry them both on to Cairo. It is wonderful the effect these magical wands produce. I owe to them even more attention than to being the supposed author of what is it? I forget!" As he went farther from home, his nonchalance increased. He found in Clay, who had joined his party, an excellent foil. "To govern men," he wrote from Malta, "you must either excel them in their accomplishments or despise them. Clay does the one, I do the other, and we are both equally popular. Affectation tells here even better than wit. Yesterday at the racket-court, sitting in the gallery among strangers, the ball entered and lightly struck me and fell at my feet. I picked it up, and observing a young rifleman excessively stiff, I humbly requested him to forward its passage into the court, as I had really never thrown a ball in my life. This incident has been the general subject of conversation at all the messes to-day." In this incident there is the real touch of Disraeli. It is easy to believe that all the messes discussed the traveller's lackadaisical ignorance of sport. It is unlikely that their comments would have pleased him. It is rumoured, indeed, that his coxcombry made him intolerable at Malta, and that the officers' mess, delighted with Clay's society, ceased to invite "that damned bumptious Jew boy." If that were true, it made no difference to Disraeli's demeanour. He al ways assumed an indifference to the opinions of others, and in 1830 at any rate he cannot have been very sensitive to ridicule. His love of extravagant costume already overpowered him. It was as though he were always dressing up for some fantastic charade. All the extravagance of the East was in the fashions that he cultivated, and he was charmed with the curiosity of the vulgar. To be pointed at white trousers, and a sash of all the colours of the rainbow; in this wonderful costume he paraded all round Valetta, followed by one-half the population of the place, and, as he said, putting a complete stop to all business." This last exploit must have brought real joy to his ambitious heart, and we are left puzzling our minds whether he was careless or unconscious of the effect he produced. At any rate he brazened it out finely. "You should see me in the costume of a Greek pirate," he writes to his brother from Malta. "A blood-red shirt, with silver studs as big as shillings, an immense scarf for girdle, full of pistols and daggers, red cap, red slippers, broad blue-striped jacket and trousers." It is amazing, and none can be surprised that the militaires, as he calls them, disapproved of his antics. He took an appropriate revenge. "By heavens!" he said, "I believe these fellows are boys till they are majors, and sometimes do not even stop there." Yet none of them had the supreme boyishness of their critic, who cheerfully faced the world in blood-red shirt and blue trousers. The farther East he went the more daringly was he compelled to force the note. "The rich and various costumes of the Levant" tempted him to the last magnificence. When he was presented to the Grand Vizier he ransacked his "heterogeneous wardrobe" to contrive such a costume as should astound that august personage. "I am quite a wear a turban, smoke a pipe six feet long, and squat on a divan. Mehemet Pasha told me that he did not think I was an Englishman, because I walked so slow; in fact, I find the habits of this calm and luxurious people entirely agree with my own preconceived opinions of propriety and enjoyment, and I detest the Greeks more than ever." Thus we find him carousing with a Bey at Previsa, and exulting in his amicable reception by Ali Pasha, in whose Hall of Audience he seated himself on the divan of the Grand Vizier "with the self-possession of a morning call." It was at Constantinople that he reached the climax of his journey. "It is near sunset," he wrote, "and Constantinople is in full sight; it baffles all description, though so often described. An immense mass of buildings, cupolas, cypress groves, and minarets. I feel an excitement which I thought was dead." Turk," he wrote from Yanina, henceforth in the temper of his Eastern home. But as from the first it was his ambition to serve England, he recognised that a knowledge of Englishmen was necessary to his development. And so he made a brilliant entry into society, which, as he knew well, held in its hand the key of political preferment. Again it seems as though he were consciously moulding his own life and character; and if in all that he does there is a certain purpose, that purpose in no sense diminishes Disraeli's frank delight in his success. Many were the advantages which he brought to the conquest of London. He was handsome, witty, and debonair. Accustomed from his childhood to mix with scholars, he had tempered his learning in the fire of the Orient, and he carried into what he would call "the salons of the great a separate knowledge of life and words. He met many who knew more than he did. He met none who knew precisely the same things, and thus it was that his niche was ready to receive him. Moreover, he could talk brilliantly when he chose. A still rarer accomplishment was his, he could be silent. He understood the light and shade of conversation, and never made himself tiresome or ridiculous by a too insistent volubility. When Mrs Wyndham Lewis told him that she liked "silent, melancholy men," she was but flattering his pride. Moreover, the habit of masquerade, which he had cultivated in the East, had not left The last sentence is, of course, a hint of the familiar pose. In Disraeli's heart and brain enthusiasm never died. He lived in a white heat, which fused with his soul the experience of the moment. As we have said, his journey to the East profoundly influenced his word and deed. When he came back his nature had undergone (so to say) a chemical change. He had visited his origins, and found in Judaism a solution of the problems of the West. Like Contarini he turned the tables on "the flatnosed Franks," and exulted him. Whether Society liked him or not, Society could not ignore a man who came before it so oddly suited. His apparel long since became a legend, and seems, in these days of uniformity, an outrage upon taste and tact. If any one dared to present himself before the world to-day in the fantastic disguises which Disraeli affected, he would be driven into retirement with insult. It must be remembered, of course, that Disraeli lived in a fantastic age. Even D'Orsay, the master of fashion, the supreme arbiter of elegancies, permitted himself freedom of manner and attire which would have shocked the dandies. And Disraeli surpassed D'Orsay in extravagance far more than D'Orsay surpassed the exquisites of the Regency. It was Brummel's laudable ambition to walk down St James's Street unnoticed. It was Disraeli's purpose to be noticed before all others wherever he went. In brief, he assumed a sort of fancy dress as a short cut to fame, and hoped by this means to atone for the absence of family connections and conventional education. That he went no further in masquerade than the necessities of the case demanded we can easily believe. He knew his public, and though his taste was ever flamboyant, he was an artist in life as in other things. But if we may believe his contemporaries, he was a kind of Osric, a veritable waterfly. Here is Lady Dufferin's description of him: "He wore a black velvet coat lined with satin, purple trousers with a gold band running down the outside seam, a scarlet waistcoat, long lace ruffles falling down to the tips of his fingers, and long black ringlets rippling down upon his shoulders." Even on the hustings he did not mitigate his fancy. He appeared at Taunton "very showily attired in a dark bottle-green frock-coat, a waistcoat of the most extravagant pattern, the front of which was almost covered with glittering chains, and in fancy-pattern pantaloons. He wore a plain black stock, but no collar was visible. Altogether," says a spectator, "he was the most intellectual-looking exquisite I had ever seen." That such antics should have acquired notoriety for him is not surprising. That they should not in the slightest degree have diminished the respect in which he was held by his friends is the highest tribute to his worth and power of fascination. Such were some of the guises in which he conquered London, and every step in his triumphal progress is recorded in the letters which he wrote home. "I wish," wrote his father, "that your organisation allowed you to write calmer letters." The wish was vain. Disraeli's enthusiasm broke down every barrier of restraint. He lived always on the top of the wave. For him the Ocean of Society was ever buoyant and sparkling in the sunshine. He knew only the "first-rate " people, and welcomed with pride the dislike of the secondrate. One night there is a "brilliant réunion" at Bulwer's, with Strangford, Mulgrave, and D'Orsay among the notables; another day he sits at dinner between Peel and Herries. A few months later he is living upon terms of friendship with the incomparable Mrs Norton, and her sister, Mrs Blackwood, "also very handsome and very Sheridanio." His table is "literally covered with invitations," many from people whom he does not know. "I have passed the whole of this year in uninterrupted lounging and pleasure," he confides to his Diary in September 1833. Then he became very popular with the dandies, and the crown was set upon his social career. "D'Orsay took a fancy to me," he writes, "and they take their tune from him. Lady Blessington is their muse, and she declared violently in my favour." Thus it was that all the houses in England opened their doors to him, and when he came before the world as a politician few men were better known to their contemporaries than Disraeli the Younger. We have said that in this volume Disraeli is permitted as much as possible to tell the story of his own life. And it is evident at once that he was a born man of letters. It was not for nothing that he saw the light in a library, and was nurtured on Lucian and Voltaire. He never set pen to paper without expressing his own thoughts in his own way. A sense of the picturesque vivifies the least scrap of his writing. He is not afraid to put himself, and his wit, and his cynicism, and his flam boyancy, upon paper. And here he presents a perfect contrast to Mr Gladstone, who, in spite of his literary training, in spite of a profound and prolonged education, was never in the true sense a man of letters at all. Gladstone's letters are undistinguished and indistinguishable. There are few of them that anybody else might not have written. And his published works are not likely to keep the smallest corner in the world's esteem. That he was far more deeply read than Disraeli goes without saying. He was a scholar in the sense that Disraeli was never a scholar. But he was artist neither in words nor in ideas, and every year makes the gap between the two men wider and deeper. To Gladstone's talent Disraeli opposed his wayward genius, and has at last taken a place in English literature from which he will never be dislodged. At first his triumph in politics obscured the real merits of his novels, which suffered also from the campaign of obloquy in which their author was attacked. We know better now, and even the most hostile critics have recognised that Disraeli's early novels would be memorable for their own sakes, even if they did not throw a brilliant light upon the growth of their author's mind and upon the manners of their author's time. To Disraeli's novels Mr Monypenny has done wise and ample justice, and this is by no means the least of our obligations to him. It is |