The Sun.
London, England, 1852-06-07 00:00:00

THE -SUN,

BENJAMIN DISRAELI.

Since the death of George Canning, no more re-
markable instance has heel) witnessed of a man of the
people elevating himself to the dignity of a Cabinet Minister than that afforded by the; career of the Right
Honourable Gentleman, now her Miijesty's Chan-
cellor of the Exchequer. It becomes interesting.,
therefore, to trace the progress -of one who, withoutany adventitious assistance, has already in. tirr,
flower of his manhood risen -from private life
to public distinction—or, at Uay rate, - to observe the
development of thus intellectual powers-which have
at last constituted him one of the leaders of the Bri-
tish
Government.

Benjamin Disraeli, born in London during the
December of 1805, is the descendant of one of those
Hebrew families known by the venerable title of the
Sephardim. According to the most simple definition-,
the Sephardim where those among the children of Israel
who never deserted the shores of the Mediterranean
until driven thence by ad veree circumstances. The
majority of these took up their abode in the cities of
Aragon and Andalusie, where they continued to re-.
side until expelled by the authority of Torquirnadaa
The ancestors of the Member far Bhickirigham were,
in this manner, compelled to emigrate from the Pe-
ninsula towards the eloee of the fifteenth century, in
consequence of the extraordinary severities in-
flicted by the Inquieition. Thereupon they se-
lected the Venetian Republic for their place of
residence, and—having assumed, instead of their
Gothic surname, the more suggestive and appropriate
one of Disraeli—flourished as merchants, under the
banners cf St. Mark, for upwards of two centuries.
A little more than a hundred years ago the great-
grandfather of the subject of this biographical sketch
sent his youngest son Benjamin to these islands,
in order that he might push his fortunes• under
the shelter of a more liberal and enlightened
system of administration. Mr. Pelham being then
Prime Minister of England and favourably disposed
towards the descendants of Abraham, . Benjamin
Disraeli—grandfather of the present leader of the
House of Commons—became, in 1748, an English
denizen. Having married, in 1765, he appears to
have ultimately settled down at Enfield in compara-
tive luxury. There it was that he continued
for many years to amuse himself during the
intervals of leisure snatched from commercial avoca-
tions sufficiently profitable in their results—occa-
sionally playing whist with Sir Horace Mann, or
sauntering through an Italian garden he had planted,
or eating macaroni prepared by the hand of the
Venetian Consul—surviving until 1817, the year of
his dissolution. There is a pleasant story told of
the parent of Bartholdy, the composer, whose
grandfather had previously been scarcely less
renowned as a metaphysician—namely, that he used
to remark not long before his decease, «I am, as it
were, a link of mediocrity connecting together the
genius of two distinct generations—in my youth I
used to be pointed out as the son, as now in my old
age I am pointed out As the-father of the Great Men.
delesohn !" Although different in some respects, the
position of Benjamin Disraeli the elder might in
others have been somewhat analogous to the position
of the elder Mendelesohn. At ninety ho was. cheered
by the celebrity of .his son ; had he passed yet further.
beyond the allotted age of man he might have -found
still greater reason to exult in the reputation of his
grandson. At the period of his arrival in England,
about the middle of' the eighteenth century, ho
had discovered in this country representatives of
other families of the Sephardige such as the Medintie,
and the Villa Reals, and the Lards (kinsmen of the
Disreelie) and the Mendez da Costae. At the time
of his demise, only the last mentioned are believed to
have left survivors, whereas, with himself, his name
has not only been perpetuated through two genera-
tions,-but imperishably inscribed upon the scroll
of our national literature, and emblazoned even upon
the records of the national administration.
His son, Isaac Disraeli, besides giving to the
world many other luminous volumes in which
he analyzed with so much perspicacious subtlety of
intelligence the joys, and the sorrows, and the pe.
culiar and hitherto bewildering idiosyncracy of the
student, has written the most classic miscellany
in the language, " The Curiosities of Litera-
ture." His grandson and namesake, on the
other hand, has combined n brilliant success in
letters with the most undeniable triumph over the
almost countless difficulties besetting a political
gladiator in the arena of the Legislature. A popular
novelist, he has, nevertheless, ventured to aspire to
the highest offices within the grasp of a statesman—
and, what is yet more, his aspirations have been's() far
realized already, that ho is acknowledged to be
perhaps, of' all, the most skilful debater in Par-
liament, while the chief of the new Cabinet
testified in an extraordinary manner the sense
entertained of his capacities when nominating him—
(although hitherto principally celebrated as a romance-
writer)—Minister of Finance to the most wonderful
commercial empire either of modern times or of the
most enterprizing ages cf antiquity.
During his minority Disraeli had not only travelled
through the principle cities of Germany, but had pub-
lished his novel of Vivian Grey, which, by the freshness
of its manner and the originality of its very imperti-
nence—girding as its stripling author had done
throughout, sometimes at the most venerable foibles,
and sometimes even at the most venerated absurdities
of the social system—at once fixed upon him
the attention, if it failed to secure to him per-
manently the admiration, of his contemporaries. The
sparkling vivacity of the work rendered it " the rage"
for more than one season and called forth a sequel,
which extended it to five volumes altogether. Sub-
sequently, on attaining his majority, in 1826, he tra-
versed the classical ground of Italy and Greece, wit-
nessing some of the incidents of the civil war then
desolating Albania. Haying wintered at - Con-
stantinople in 1829-30, he travelled - through
Syria in the spring, crossing the desert into Egypt,
and proceeding up the Nile until he had penetrated
into Nubia. During these oriental wanderings he
drained not unfrequent draughts of inspiration—but
more peculiarly in the country regarded by him, not
unnaturally, as his ancestral fatherland, the land
which had been governed by the tetrarch and sung by
the troubadour. - From these dreapas, however, he was
recalled immediately on his return homewards, where,
in 1831, he found the people of England agitated by
the influence of a great political movement. It was at
this time he aspired ineffectually to represent • the
borough of Wycombe in the Hotir,m of Commons, the
electors rejecting -him, from a preference for the two
other Liberal candidates, notwithstanding thg • cir-
cumstance of Joseph Hume having introduced
him to the notice' 'of the constituency
Disraeli having thus, from his animosity towards
the Whigs, associated his own name with thee of the
veteran Reformer. Twice, he had the mortification
of appearing on the local hustings in the character .of
a discomfited candidate : and from a recollection of
these incidents, we may presume that he turned With
additional zest from the dusty highroad of politics'
to the cool and sequestered garden of litera-
ture. Contarini Fleming appeared in 1833, and
was designated a " Psychological • Romance."
Appearing in the form of an autobiography, it en-
deavoured to pourtray the gradual and almost im-
perceptible development, not merely of a generous
and passionate nature, but of an elevated and poetic
temperament. It was suggested, we cannot but con-
jecture, not so much by the marvellous pages of
Wilhelm Meister, as by that more sombre effu-
sion of the genius of Goethe, " The Sorrows
of Werter," in which it is impossible not to
discover the germ of what subsequently expanded into
the Apprenticeship. There is discernible,. moreover, a
wonderful resemblance between the diplomatic career
of Werter before he first had the rapturous happiness
of beholding Charlotte, and those passages in the life
of Fleming which involved him for a while
inoltahtt.he subordinate avocations of Government
volate
ility, and
distaste for office, the same
v
and •the-. .same restive' ness... There
is a graceful reminiscence of Disraeli's own
thec
origino the genealogy of his hero—deriving
n nameta i fromo f
Flemingt b e
'the Saxons and that of
Venetia In
In the yearning of
the young child for N
atth,re when he exclaims " And I too will fly to Egeria
the sylvan dream of:PninPl the
author dreams again
of the pure and the. beautuifg'ul_the exquisite dream
be imagines that the spiritof
Egeria becomes
When, however,
incarnated in the woodlands he does
the visions of antiquity; antici more than revive
erates those da h
ing revelations "D'Outre Tonab'e," among . !ye' C -
long after wards recognised the phantom seen which. was
in soli-
tude, and loved with an unutterable andmore than
earthly tenderness by Woe de Chateauhrianda
Contarini's affection in his childhood for Chris-
tiana, and his attachment in his schooldays
to the rustic Mumus, are described with singular
intensity of feeling. His frantic fight in the play-
ground and his subsequent reflections are incidents
depicted in colours
s so marvellously true to nature,
that it is evident the author spoke in them from the
depths of his own emotional experience. More agree-
able than these are the vicissitudes of Fleming when he
encounters the Chevalier de Winter, or, previously
when he falls in with the itinerant actors, including
the frolic Thalia and the pensive Melpomene. The most
enthralling portioes of the narrative, however, are those
which treat of the brigand expedition of the students,
led by Contarini, terminating with the abandon-
m,?nt of the Castle in the Forest, and the journey under-
taken by the hero to Venice, ending in his elopement
with Alcest6. In the course of his peregrinations he
wanders, naturally enough, in the precincts of Par-
nassus. His tragedy he wisely baths in manuscript, as
is unhappily related of poor Gerald Griffin, the author
of " Gissippue." His novel, entitled
" ManstelD,.
on the contrary, is published and widely circulated,
but,' eulogised while anonymous, the
author, when ,
once discovered, is deliberately " scarifi.d and
scalped" by the reviewers. The whole story
e story

terminates with _ an epicurean episode in his
exisU nce at. Camila, closed by the death of Alceste
and the desolation of Conterini. More remarkable in
every rescrct then the for'egoing, production was
The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, which appears to have
been written almnst simultaneously, and which, al-
though replete in . several parts with rhetorical
extravagance and overladen with the barbaric
pomp of a gorgeous and even at times meretricious
decoration—must ba considered. as perhaps the most
remarkable contribution made by the younger Di:s-
rrieh's hand to the treasures of our romantic literature.
Its style was a mistake—blending prose with rhythm,
and interruptirg this rhythm with an occasional jingle
of rhymer--a style calculated more than any other
to alternate between the vapid and the hyperbolical.
Otherwise "Alroy," in the splendour of its descriptions,
might be regarded as the finest oriental fiction writ-
ten in our language since the incomparable "Vathek"
of B,ckford. It was a noble and touching tribute,
moreover, offered by' the romancist to the memory of
his Hebrew ancestors—recounting, by events dating
back to the twelfth century, the rise and fall of
David Alroy, the Prince of the Captivity. The
story opens, after an explanatory dialogue, in the
burial-ground at Hamadan, by the side of this
traditionary tomb of Esther and Mordecai. The

time is evening, and the Jewish maidens come, ac-
cording to their national wont, to draw water at the
fountain. They are insulted by the governor of the
city, Alschiroeh, who is- slain upon the spot
by David Alroy, the latter fly ing, not merely
to save himself from destruction, but to wreak
a more comprehensive vengeance upon the op-
pressors of the children of Abraham. Such is the
dramatic commencement of a narrative which as it
proceeds gathers interest as an avalanche gathers imt
petus—carrying the attention onwards with it in
breathless suspense until the moment of the crowning
catastrophe. The Prince of the Captivity discovers
Jabaster the Cabalist, and, being warned in his cave
by the Daughter of the Voice (the. Beth Kul
or Filia Vocic, according to the Rabbinical and Tal-
mudic annotators) advances towards the completion
of his destinies. In crossing the wildernees,
Alroy arrives at a ruined city, and while traversing
its apparently deserted streets, is seized and
carried before the Captain of the Robbers, Scherirab.
Escaping from his captors, he is overtaken in the
desert by the ainnorn, and saved from this yet
more formidable peril by the Mecca Caravan
returning to Bagdad, David is happily befriended
in the latter city by Honain, the Sultan's Hakim
or Physician. Honain, who proves to be the brother
of Jabaster, conducts the Prince of the Captivity into
the kiosk of the suburban garden of the palace, where
he beholds the favourite daughter of the Caliph, the
beautiful Princess Schirene. Assisted by the
influence cf Honain, and protected by the
talisman of Jabaster, Alroy at length suc-
ceeds •in reaching the object of his destioatioa—
Jerusalem, There it is that, reposing one
night in the tombs without the wall?, he listens to
the ghouls conversing, penetrates the cread mysteries
of the Cave of Genthesme, and thereby obtains, in
spite of innumerable difficulties, the venerable and
consecrated sceptre of Solomon. With this assur-
eance of ultimate victory in his possession, he speedily
gains over to his cause the robber-captain Seherirah.
His lawless followers are thereupon brought
into something like discipline, and, incited
by the valour of athletic ruffians like Kisloch
the Kourd and Calidas the Indian, utterly
rout the forces decoyed into the ruined city of the
desert under the banners of Hasson Subab, the newly-
appointed Governor of Hamadan. Thereupon, King
David makes his triumphal entry into Hamadan,
where he is welcomed by his sister Miriam and his
uncle Bostenay ; and subsequently takes
possession of Bagdad, where he is united
in marriage to the Princess Sehirene. Here,
however, the crowning triumph is followed by a
rapid and overwhelming catastrophe. Tee Prince of
the Captivity, elevated into the King of brae!,
dwindles into the Caliph of Bagdad. The hero de-
generates into the voluptuary. How the mar-
vellous suenesses of .Alroy are followed by,
a series of terrible and (some of them) pre-
ternatural calamities; how the very meteors portend
disaster by writing " Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" in the
heavens with living thunderbolts; how Esther the
Prophetess attempts the assassination of David at
midnight, her dagger splintering into fragments
against the talisman; how Jabaster is strangled
while the serail is being destroyed by a confla-
gration; and how—most perilous of all—while the
tempest is roaring over the palace roof the storm-bolt
is heard clanging in the armoury, from which the
sceptre of Solomon is found immeedately afterwards
to have vanished—the original narrative can alone
adequately describe. The fascination of the story
towards its conclusion becomes altogether absorbing,
and almost as irresistible as the downfall of the
modern Sesostris. Flying into the wilderness
during a brief interval after his discomfiture,
Alroy is ultimately betrayed by Kisloch the Kourd
and Calidas the Indian, being conducted to Bagdad
as a prisoner. Confined in a subterraneous dungeon,
the Lord of Asia there undergoes a variety of temp-
tations. Ultimately he is brought into the public square
to expiate his former triumphs by being impaled before
the Cadi and the King of Karasme. From this ap-
palling punishment, however, he is redeemed by so
enraging Alp Arslan by his taunts that—dreading
lest his once puissant antagonist may be snatched by
his suspected sorceries from execution—the monarch
strikes off the head of David Alroy with a single
blow of his scimitar. Such is a rapid epitome of
the gorgeous romance in which a descendant of a
family of the Sephardim has celebrated the career
of a Hebrew Adventurer. Its barbaric pomp is not
the least appropriate characteristic of a narrative
ss
the glow oe which is a reflex from the
Arabian Ni hts'
Entertainments. Over the stirring
fortunes of Alroy, his love for the beautiful Schirene
hangs like the roseate haze enveloping the magic-
palace of Aladdin—investing with a new splendour
the precious stones on the pavement, the ceilings
of qi9cwcod, and . the columns of por-
phyry. The various passages relating to
this tenderness between the Princess of Bagdad
and the Prince of the Captivity are coloured with a
truly oriental magnificence. The Love that inspired
them, one might conjecture, was not the offspring of
the Cyprian Venus, but
the gaudy ,and fantastic Monmadi, with a bow of
sugarcane, and arrows tipped with flowers, sailing
among the branches of the palm and the cypress,
w a
beteen the wings of rather that liindoo Cupid,
parrot !
Singularly,inferior to the foregoing
Was the next
producion—given to the world, we cannot but think,
in a ickunient when judgment was suffering eclipse
from ambition. `.Cho must long since, a we be-
lieve, have repented the publication of the quarto
volume entitled The Revolutionary L
-7piek, regarding
it, as he infallibly must, as the ill-fated fruit of an
unlucky hallucination. Although the prefatory
remarks commenced with the somewhat pretentious
declaration, " It was. on the plains of Troy, that I
first conceived the idea .of, this work," and closed with
the seemingly arrogant assumption that if read aright
it might " teach wisdom both to monarchs and to
multitudes;" the writer,
In another part of his ob-
servations, candidly and modestly confessed that, in
the event of the " Epick" being condemned by his
contemporaries, he should " without a pang hurl his
lyre to Limbo." Three Books, constituting we may
presume merely a quarter of the entire composition,
were issued in 1834, since when no further instal-
ment has been demanded even by the curiosity of, the
reviewers. Demogorgon is revealed upon a throne
surrounded by oeleetial beings " with amethystine
wings and starry crowns," in the opening of th,e
poem, which sub?equently relates to the rivalry
exercised on earth by hlsgros, the Genius of Feudal-
ism, and Lyridon, the Genius of Federalism.. The in-
terest, as was but natural, breaks down under the weight
of a cumbrous allegory. Against its deadening and
depressing influences are required either the elevating
expansiveness of a faith like that of Bunyan, or the
vivifying sensuousness of a genius like that of Speu-
ear. Discouraged as a poet, Disraeli adventured upon
the more homely labours of a pamphleteer. In a
letter addressed to a Noble and Learned Lord [meaning
Lyndhurst] be pronounced what he designated on the
title-page a Vindication ofthe English Constitution, the
argument extending over upwards of 200 pages, and
claiming for itself, not without reason, the importance
of a political treatise. Besides vindicating the Eng-
lish Constitution, it comprised two subordinate yin.
dications, namely a vindication (pp. 193.197) of the
Tories, and a vindication (pp. 199.201) of Sir
Robert Peel and his colleagues. :With a variety of
shrewd comments upon the relative value and
diversity of our institutions, the volume fails
to combine what would have at once constituted
it an authority—a concise and specific definition of
the manifold forces of Government. Clever as one
of the more remarkable among the " paper pellets" of
Party, the l
vo ume afforded no insight into what may
be termed the
science of political dynatnics
During the same year which witnessed the ap-
pearance of his letter
Disraeli became a
er to Lord Lyndhurst, 1835,
candidate for the borough of Taun-
ton, the Tories having Once more resumed the reins
of , government. Again 11'
House of Commons provedattempt to enter the
opponent, - Mr:: Laboucher signallyobt unsuccessful,. his
nearly two to one : but, :gat was a majority of
yet more unfortu-
nate, the electioneering excitement
collision with the Irish Liberatbrought him into
Liberator, all but leading to
duel, and productive of an angry a
correspondence
ending in a series of the most bitter tecrimioations
Atlength, in 1837,Benjamin Disraeli, then thirty-two,'
entered Parliament as the repreientative of Maidstone,
W3,ndliam Lewis being his celleaguo in the repre-
sentatien of that Conservative. constituency. The
failure of his maiden speech—extorting from him the
prediction that the time would come when he would
be listened to by the Members of the Legislature
(reminding one of Sheridan's exclamation under
similar circumstances, " It is in me, end by it