Бенџамин Дизраели: ТАНКРЕД

CHAPTER XX.

A Modern Troubadour

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‘I have been talking with Montacute,’ whispered Lord Henry to Coningsby, who was seated next to him. ‘Wonderful fellow! You can conceive nothing richer! Very wild, but all the right ideas; exaggerated of course. You must get hold of him after dinner.’

‘But they say he is going to Jerusalem.’

‘But he will return.’

‘I do not know that; even Napoleon regretted that he had ever re-crossed the Mediterranean. The East is a career.’

Mr. Vavasour was a social favourite; a poet and a real poet, and a troubadour, as well as a member of Parliament; travelled, sweet-tempered, and good-hearted; amusing and clever. With catholic sympathies and an eclectic turn of mind, Mr. Vavasour saw something good in everybody and everything, which is certainly amiable, and perhaps just, but disqualifies a man in some degree for the business of life, which requires for its conduct a certain degree of prejudice. Mr. Vavasour’s breakfasts were renowned. Whatever your creed, class, or country, one might almost add your character, you were a welcome guest at his matutinal meal, provided you were celebrated. That qualification, however, was rigidly enforced.

It not rarely happened that never were men more incongruously grouped. Individuals met at his hospitable house who had never met before, but who for years had been cherishing in solitude mutual detestation, with all the irritable exaggeration of the literary character. Vavasour liked to be the Amphitryon of a cluster of personal enemies. He prided himself on figuring as the social medium by which rival reputations became acquainted, and paid each other in his presence the compliments which veiled their ineffable disgust. All this was very well at his rooms in the Albany, and only funny; but when he collected his menageries at his ancestral hall in a distant county, the sport sometimes became tragic.

A real philosopher, alike from his genial disposition and from the influence of his rich and various information, Vavasour moved amid the strife, sympathising with every one; and perhaps, after all, the philanthropy which was his boast was not untinged by a dash of humour, of which rare and charming quality he possessed no inconsiderable portion. Vavasour liked to know everybody who was known, and to see everything which ought to be seen. He also was of opinion that everybody who was known ought to know him; and that the spectacle, however splendid or exciting, was not quite perfect without his presence.

His life was a gyration of energetic curiosity; an insatiable whirl of social celebrity. There was not a congregation of sages and philosophers in any part of Europe which he did not attend as a brother. He was present at the camp of Kalisch in his yeomanry uniform, and assisted at the festivals of Barcelona in an Andalusian jacket. He was everywhere, and at everything; he had gone down in a diving-bell and gone up in a balloon. As for his acquaintances, he was welcomed in every land; his universal sympathies seemed omnipotent. Emperor and king, jacobin and carbonaro, alike cherished him. He was the steward of Polish balls and the vindicator of Russian humanity; he dined with Louis Philippe, and gave dinners to Louis Blanc.

This was a dinner of which the guests came to partake. Though they delighted in each other’s society, their meetings were not so rare that they need sacrifice the elegant pleasures of a refined meal for the opportunity of conversation. They let that take its chance, and ate and drank without affectation. Nothing so rare as a female dinner where people eat, and few things more delightful. On the present occasion some time elapsed, while the admirable performances of Sidonia’s cook were discussed, with little interruption; a burst now and then from the ringing voice of Mrs. Coningsby crossing a lance with her habitual opponent, Mr. Vavasour, who, however, generally withdrew from the skirmish when a fresh dish was handed to him.

At length, the second course being served, Mrs. Coningsby said, ‘I think you have all eaten enough: I have a piece of information for you. There is going to be a costume ball at the Palace.’

This announcement produced a number of simultaneous remarks and exclamations. ‘When was it to be? What was it to be? An age, or a country; or an olio of all ages and all countries?’

‘An age is a masquerade,’ said Sidonia. ‘The more contracted the circle, the more perfect the illusion.’

‘Oh, no!’ said Vavasour, shaking his head. ‘An age is the thing; it is a much higher thing. What can be finer than to represent the spirit of an age?’

‘And Mr. Vavasour to perform the principal part,’ said Mrs. Coningsby. ‘I know exactly what he means. He wants to dance the polka as Petrarch, and find a Laura in every partner.’

‘You have no poetical feeling,’ said Mr. Vavasour, waving his hand. ‘I have often told you so.’

‘You will easily find Lauras, Mr. Vavasour, if you often write such beautiful verses as I have been reading to-day,’ said Lady Marney.

‘You, on the contrary,’ said Mr. Vavasour, bowing, ‘have a great deal of poetic feeling, Lady Marney; I have always said so.’

‘But give us your news, Edith,’ said Coningsby. ‘Imagine our suspense, when it is a question, whether we are all to look picturesque or quizzical.’

‘Ah, you want to know whether you can go as Cardinal Mazarin, or the Duke of Ripperda, Harry. I know exactly what you all are now thinking of; whether you will draw the prize in the forthcoming lottery, and get exactly the epoch and the character which suit you. Is it not so, Lord Montacute? Would not you like to practise a little with your crusados at the Queen’s ball before you go to the Holy Sepulchre?’

‘I would rather hear your description of it,’ said Tancred.

‘Lord Henry, I see, is half inclined to be your companion as a Red-cross Knight,’ continued Edith. ‘As for Lady Marney, she is the successor of Mrs. Fry, and would wish, I am sure, to go to the ball as her representative.’

‘And pray what are you thinking of being?’ said Mr. Vavasour. ‘We should like very much to be favoured with Mrs. Coningsby’s ideal of herself.’

‘Mrs. Coningsby leaves the ideal to poets. She is quite satisfied to remain what she is, and it is her intention to do so, though she means to go to Her Majesty’s ball.’

‘I see that you are in the secret,’ said Lord Marney.

‘If I could only keep secrets, I might turn out something.’ said Mrs. Coningsby. ‘I am the depositary of so much that is occult-joys, sorrows, plots, and scrapes; but I always tell Harry, and he always betrays me. Well, you must guess a little. Lady Marney begins.’

‘Well, we were at one at Turin,’ said Lady Marney, ‘and it was oriental, Lalla Rookh. Are you to be a sultana?’

Mrs. Coningsby shook her head.

‘Come, Edith,’ said her husband; ‘if you know, which I doubt——’

‘Oh! you doubt——’

‘Valentine told me yesterday,’ said Mr. Vavasour, in a mock peremptory tone, ‘that there would not be a ball.’

‘And Lord Valentine told me yesterday that there would be a ball, and what the ball would be; and what is more, I have fixed on my dress,’ said Mrs. Coningsby.

‘Such a rapid decision proves that much antiquarian research is not necessary,’ said Sidonia. ‘Your period is modern.’

‘Ah!’ said Edith, looking at Sidonia, ‘he always finds me out. Well, Mr. Vavasour, you will not be able to crown yourself with a laurel wreath, for the gentlemen will wear wigs.’

‘Louis Quatorze?’ said her husband. ‘Peel as Louvois.’

‘No, Sir Robert would be content with nothing less than Le Grand Colbert, rue Richelieu, No. 75, grand magasin de nouveautés très-anciennes: prix fixé, avec quelques rabais.’

‘A description of Conservatism,’ said Coningsby.

The secret was soon revealed: every one had a conjecture and a commentary: gentlemen in wigs, and ladies powdered, patched, and sacked. Vavasour pondered somewhat dolefully on the anti-poetic spirit of the age; Coningsby hailed him as the author of Leonidas.

‘And you, I suppose, will figure as one of the “boys” arrayed against the great Sir Robert?’ said Mr. Vavasour, with a countenance of mock veneration for that eminent personage.

‘The “boys” beat him at last,’ said Coningsby; and then, with a rapid precision and a richness of colouring which were peculiar to him, he threw out a sketch which placed the period before them; and they began to tear it to tatters, select the incidents, and apportion the characters.

Two things which are necessary to a perfect dinner are noiseless attendants, and a precision in serving the various dishes of each course, so that they may all be placed upon the table at the same moment. A deficiency in these respects produces that bustle and delay which distract many an agreeable conversation and spoil many a pleasant dish. These two excellent characteristics were never wanting at the dinners of Sidonia. At no house was there less parade. The appearance of the table changed as if by the waving of a wand, and silently as a dream. And at this moment, the dessert being arranged, fruits and their beautiful companions, flowers, reposed in alabaster baskets raised on silver stands of filigree work.

There was half an hour of merry talk, graceful and gay: a good story, a bon-mot fresh from the mint, some raillery like summer lightning, vivid but not scorching.

‘And now,’ said Edith, as the ladies rose to return to the library, ‘and now we leave you to Maynooth.’

‘By-the-bye, what do they say to it in your House, Lord Marney?’ inquired Henry Sydney, filling his glass.

‘It will go down,’ said Lord Marney. ‘A strong dose for some, but they are used to potent potions.’

‘The bishops, they say, have not made up their minds.’

‘Fancy bishops not having made up their minds,’ exclaimed Tancred: ‘the only persons who ought never to doubt.’

‘Except when they are offered a bishopric,’ said Lord Marney.

‘Why I like this Maynooth project,’ said Tancred, ‘though otherwise it little interests me, is, that all the shopkeepers are against it.’

‘Don’t tell that to the minister,’ said Coningsby, ‘or he will give up the measure.’

‘Well, that is the very reason,’ said Vavasour, ‘why, though otherwise inclined to the grant, I hesitate as to my vote. I have the highest opinion of the shopkeepers; I sympathise even with their prejudices. They are the class of the age; they represent its order, its decency, its industry.’

‘And you represent them,’ said Coningsby. ‘Vavasour is the quintessence of order, decency, and industry.’

‘You may jest,’ said Vavasour, shaking his head with a spice of solemn drollery; ‘but public opinion must and ought to be respected, right or wrong.’

‘What do you mean by public opinion?’ said Tancred.

‘The opinion of the reflecting majority,’ said Vavasour.

‘Those who don’t read your poems,’ said Coningsby.

‘Boy, boy!’ said Vavasour, who could endure raillery from one he had been at college with, but who was not over-pleased at Coningsby selecting the present occasion to claim his franchise, when a new man was present like Lord Montacute, on whom Vavasour naturally wished to produce an impression. It must be owned that it was not, as they say, very good taste in the husband of Edith, but prosperity had developed in Coningsby a native vein of sauciness which it required all the solemnity of the senate to repress. Indeed, even there, upon the benches, with a grave face, he often indulged in quips and cranks that convulsed his neighbouring audience, who often, amid the long dreary nights of statistical imposture, sought refuge in his gay sarcasms, his airy personalities, and happy quotations.

‘I do not see how there can be opinion without thought,’ said Tancred; ‘and I do not believe the public ever think. How can they? They have no time. Certainly we live at present under the empire of general ideas, which are extremely powerful. But the public have not invented those ideas. They have adopted them from convenience. No one has confidence in himself; on the contrary, every one has a mean idea of his own strength and has no reliance on his own judgment. Men obey a general impulse, they bow before an external necessity, whether for resistance or action. Individuality is dead; there is a want of inward and personal energy in man; and that is what people feel and mean when they go about complaining there is no faith.’

‘You would hold, then,’ said Henry Sydney, ‘that the progress of public liberty marches with the decay of personal greatness?’

‘It would seem so.’

‘But the majority will always prefer public liberty to personal greatness,’ said Lord Marney.

‘But, without personal greatness, you never would have had public liberty,’ said Coningsby.

‘After all, it is civilisation that you are kicking against,’ said Vavasour.

‘I do not understand what you mean by civilisation,’ said Tancred.

‘The progressive development of the faculties of man,’ said Vavasour.

‘Yes, but what is progressive development?’ said Sidonia; ‘and what are the faculties of man? If development be progressive, how do you account for the state of Italy? One will tell you it is superstition, indulgences, and the Lady of Loretto; yet three centuries ago, when all these influences were much more powerful, Italy was the soul of Europe. The less prejudiced, a Puseyite for example, like our friend Vavasour, will assure us that the state of Italy has nothing to do with the spirit of its religion, but that it is entirely an affair of commerce; a revolution of commerce has convulsed its destinies. I cannot forget that the world was once conquered by Italians who had no commerce. Has the development of Western Asia been progressive? It is a land of tombs and ruins. Is China progressive, the most ancient and numerous of existing societies? Is Europe itself progressive? Is Spain a tithe as great as she was? Is Germany as great as when she invented printing; as she was under the rule of Charles the Fifth? France herself laments her relative inferiority to the past. But England flourishes. Is it what you call civilisation that makes England flourish? Is it the universal development of the faculties of man that has rendered an island, almost unknown to the ancients, the arbiter of the world? Clearly not. It is her inhabitants that have done this; it is an affair of race. A Saxon race, protected by an insular position, has stamped its diligent and methodic character on the century. And when a superior race, with a superior idea to work and order, advances, its state will be progressive, and we shall, perhaps, follow the example of the desolate countries. All is race; there is no other truth.’

‘Because it includes all others?’ said Lord Henry.

‘You have said it.’

‘As for Vavasour’s definition of civilisation,’ said Coningsby, ‘civilisation was more advanced in ancient than modern times; then what becomes of the progressive principle? Look at the great centuries of the Roman Empire! You had two hundred millions of human beings governed by a jurisprudence so philosophical that we have been obliged to adopt its laws, and living in perpetual peace. The means of communication, of which we now make such a boast, were far more vast and extensive in those days. What were the Great Western and the London and Birmingham to the Appian and Flaminian roads? After two thousand five hundred years, parts of these are still used. A man under the Antonines might travel from Paris to Antioch with as much ease and security as we go from London to York. As for free trade, there never was a really unshackled commerce except in the days when the whole of the Mediterranean coasts belonged to one power. What a chatter there is now about

 the towns, and how their development is cited as the peculiarity of the age, and the great security for public improvement. Why, the Roman Empire was the empire of great cities. Man was then essentially municipal.’

‘What an empire!’ said Sidonia. ‘All the superior races in all the superior climes.’

‘But how does all this accord with your and Coningsby’s favourite theory of the influence of individual character?’ said Vavasour to Sidonia; ‘which I hold, by-the-bye,’ he added rather pompously, ‘to be entirely futile.’

‘What is individual character but the personification of race,’ said Sidonia, ‘its perfection and choice exemplar? Instead of being an inconsistency, the belief in the influence of the individual is a corollary of the original proposition.’

‘I look upon a belief in the influence of individual character as a barbarous superstition,’ said Vavasour.

‘Vavasour believes that there would be no heroes if there were a police,’ said Coningsby; ‘but I believe that civilisation is only fatal to minstrels, and that is the reason now we have no poets.’

‘How do you account for the Polish failure in 1831?’ said Lord Marney. ‘They had a capital army, they were backed by the population, but they failed. They had everything but a man.’

‘Why were the Whigs smashed in 1834,’ said Coningsby, ‘but because they had not a man?’

‘What is the real explanation of the state of Mexico?’ said Sidonia. ‘It has not a man.’

‘So much for progress since the days of Charles the Fifth,’ said Henry Sydney. ‘The Spaniards then conquered Mexico, and now they cannot govern it.’

‘So much for race,’ said Vavasour. ‘The race is the same; why are not the results the same?’

‘Because it is worn out,’ said Sidonia. ‘Why do not the Ethiopians build another Thebes, or excavate the colossal temples of the cataracts? The decay of a race is an inevitable necessity, unless it lives in deserts and never mixes its blood.’

CHAPTER XXI.

Sweet Sympathy

I AM sorry, my dear mother, that I cannot accompany you; but I must go down to my yacht this morning, and on my return from Greenwich I have an engagement.’

This was said about a week after the dinner at Sidonia’s, by Lord Montacute to the duchess. ‘That terrible yacht!’ thought the duchess. Her Grace, a year ago, had she been aware of it, would have deemed Tancred’s engagement as fearful an affair. The idea that her son should have called every day for a week on a married lady, beautiful and attractive, would have filled her with alarm amounting almost to horror. Yet such was the innocent case. It might at the first glance seem difficult to reconcile the rival charms of the Basilisk and Lady Bertie and Bellair, and to understand how Tancred could be so interested in the preparations for a voyage which was to bear him from the individual in whose society he found a daily gratification. But the truth is, that Lady Bertie and Bellair was the only person who sympathised with his adventure.

She listened with the liveliest concern to his account of all his progress; she even made many admirable suggestions, for Lady Bertie and Bellair had been a frequent visitor at Cowes, and was quite initiated in the mysteries of the dilettante service of the Yacht Club. She was a capital sailor; at least she always told Tancred so. But this was not the chief source of sympathy, or the principal bond of union, between them. It was not the voyage, so much as the object of the voyage, that touched all the passion of Lady Bertie and Bellair. Her heart was at Jerusalem. The sacred city was the dream of her life; and, amid the dissipations of May Fair and the distractions of Belgravia, she had in fact all this time only been thinking of Jehoshaphat and Sion. Strange coincidence of sentiment—strange and sweet!

The enamoured Montacute hung over her with pious rapture, as they examined together Mr. Roberts’s Syrian drawings, and she alike charmed and astonished him by her familiarity with every locality and each detail. She looked like a beautiful prophetess as she dilated with solemn enthusiasm on the sacred scene. Tancred called on her every day, because when he called the first time he had announced his immediate departure, and so had been authorised to promise that he would pay his respects to her every day till he went. It was calculated that by these means, that is to say three or four visits, they might perhaps travel through Mr. Roberts’s views together before he left England, which would facilitate their correspondence, for Tancred had engaged to write to the only person in the world worthy of receiving his letters. But, though separated, Lady Bertie and Bellair would be with him in spirit; and once she sighed and seemed to murmur that if his voyage could only be postponed awhile, she might in a manner become his fellow-pilgrim, for Lord Bertie, a great sportsman, had a desire to kill antelopes, and, wearied with the monotonous slaughter of English preserves, tired even of the eternal moors, had vague thoughts of seeking new sources of excitement amid the snipes of the Grecian marshes, and the deer and wild boars of the desert and the Syrian hills.

While his captain was repeating his inquiries for instructions on the deck of the Basilisk at Greenwich, moored off the Trafalgar Hotel, Tancred fell into reveries of female pilgrims kneeling at the Holy Sepulchre by his side; then started, gave a hurried reply, and drove back quickly to town, to pass the remainder of the morning in Brook Street.

The two or three days had expanded into two or three weeks, and Tancred continued to call daily on Lady Bertie and Bellair, to say farewell. It was not wonderful: she was the only person in London who understood him; so she delicately intimated, so he profoundly felt. They had the same ideas; they must have the same idiosyncrasy. The lady asked with a sigh why they had not met before; Tancred found some solace in the thought that they had at least become acquainted. There was something about this lady very interesting besides her beauty, her bright intelligence, and her seraphic thoughts. She was evidently the creature of impulse; to a certain degree perhaps the victim of her imagination. She seemed misplaced in life. The tone of the century hardly suited her refined and romantic spirit. Her ethereal nature seemed to shrink from the coarse reality which invades in our days even the boudoirs of May Fair.

There was something in her appearance and the temper of her being which rebuked the material, sordid, calculating genius of our reign of Mammon.

Her presence in this world was a triumphant vindication of the claims of beauty and of sentiment. It was evident that she was not happy; for, though her fair brow always lighted up when she met the glance of Tancred, it was impossible not to observe that she was sometimes strangely depressed, often anxious and excited, frequently absorbed in reverie. Yet her vivid intelligence, the clearness and precision of her thought and fancy, never faltered. In the unknown yet painful contest, the intellectual always triumphed. It was impossible to deny that she was a woman of great ability.

Nor could it for a moment be imagined that these fitful moods were merely the routine intimations that her domestic hearth was not as happy as it deserved to be. On the contrary, Lord and Lady Bertie and Bellair were the very best friends; she always spoke of her husband with interest and kindness; they were much together, and there evidently existed between them mutual confidence. His lordship’s heart, indeed, was not at Jerusalem; and perhaps this want of sympathy on a subject of such rare and absorbing interest might account for the occasional musings of his wife, taking refuge in her own solitary and devoutly passionate soul. But this deficiency on the part of his lordship could scarcely be alleged against him as a very heinous fault; it is far from usual to find a British noble who on such a topic entertains the notions and sentiments of Lord Montacute; almost as rare to find a British peeress who could respond to them with the same fervour and facility as the beautiful Lady Bertie and Bellair. The life of a British peer is mainly regulated by Arabian laws and Syrian customs at this moment; but, while he sabbatically abstains from the debate or the rubber, or regulates the quarterly performance of his judicial duties in his province by the advent of the sacred festivals, he thinks little of the land and the race who, under the immediate superintendence of the Deity, have by their sublime legislation established the principle of periodic rest to man, or by their deeds and their dogmas, commemorated by their holy anniversaries, have elevated the condition and softened the lot of every nation except their own.

‘And how does Tancred get on?’ asked Lord Eskdale one morning of the Duchess of Bellamont, with a dry smile. ‘I understand that, instead of going to Jerusalem, he is going to give us a fish dinner.’

The Duchess of Bellamont had made the acquaintance of Lady Bertie and Bellair, and was delighted with her, although her Grace had been told that Lord Montacute called upon her every day. The proud, intensely proper, and highly prejudiced Duchess of Bellamont took the most charitable view of this sudden and fervent friendship. A female friend, who talked about Jerusalem, but kept her son in London, was in the present estimation of the duchess a real treasure, the most interesting and admirable of her sex.

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