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Disraeli, in his Amenities of Literature, says that, "Tormented by the fate of a collection which had consumed forty years, at every personal sacrifice to form it for 'the use and services of posterity, he sank at the sudden stroke.
But his work is out of the ordinary courses, and does not turn round the ordinary centres of novel writing. It belongs to the tradition if to any tradition at all of Lucian and the Lucianists especially as that tradition was redirected by Anthony Hamilton. It thus comes, in one way, near part of the work of Disraeli; though, except in point of satiric temper, its spirit is totally different.
This led to what Isaac Disraeli, perhaps Dee's best biographer, has described as a "literary scene of singular novelty." Let me depict it in Disraeli's little known words: "Dee, sitting in his library," says Disraeli, "received the royal commissioners.
The rule has exceptions; but the earliest productions of a man of real genius are almost always crude, flippant, and affectedly smart, or else turgid and extravagant in a high degree. Witness Mr. Disraeli; witness Sir E.B. Lytton; witness even Macaulay. The man who as mere boy writes something very sound and sensible will probably never become more than a dull, sensible, commonplace man.
The same year Newman seceded, and was received into the Church of Rome. No similar event, before or since, has excited such consternation and alarm. So impartial an observer as Mr. Disraeli thought that the Church of England did not in his time recover from the blow. We are only concerned with it here as it affected Froude. It affected him in a way unknown outside the family.
The work is one of vast industry, and gives a useful account of an important epoch, but is extremely diffuse and one-sided, and often prosy. Disraeli satirises the author in Coningsby as Mr. Wordy, who wrote a history to prove that Providence was on the side of the Tories. It had, however, an enormous sale.
Palmerston and Russell, Gladstone and Disraeli, are made so real that we follow their contests as if we ourselves had a hand in them. A half dozen or more years ago an Englishman told me that Palmerston and Russell were no longer considered of account in England.
These most amusing papers ought to have been included in Thackeray's published miscellaneous writings, but they were not, although Bulwer is humorously travestied in Punch's "Prize Novelists," together with Lover, Ainsworth, and Disraeli. The man who says you're an As, is an As himself.
The feeling was so enormously great in its preponderance for Mr. Gladstone's policy of Liberal Reform, especially for the disestablishment of the Irish Church, that Mr. Disraeli did not adopt the usual course of waiting for the endorsement of the new Parliament, which he felt sure would be given to Mr. Gladstone, but resigned, and the first Disraeli Cabinet went out of office, December 2d.
It made one's young blood grow warmer to watch the struggle from the impartial height of the Reporters' Gallery. I was in the House on that memorable occasion when Disraeli made a speech which astounded his followers so much that they were only able to account for it by the hypothesis that he had taken too much to drink.
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