Tancred
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Benjamin Disraeli >> Tancred
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'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 nouveautes
tres-anciennes: prix fixe, 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. Their intimacy was satisfactorily accounted
for by the invaluable information which she imparted to Tancred; what
he was to see, do, eat, drink; how he was to avoid being poisoned and
assassinated, escape fatal fevers, regularly attend the service of
the Church of England in countries where there were no churches, and
converse in languages of which he had no knowledge. He could not have a
better counsellor than Lady Bertie, who had herself travelled, at least
to the Faubourg St. Honore, and, as Horace Walpole says, after Calais
nothing astonishes. Certainly Lady Bertie had not been herself to
Jerusalem, but she had read about it, and every other place. The duchess
was delighted that Tancred had a companion who interested him. With
all the impulse of her sanguine temperament, she had already accustomed
herself to look upon the long-dreaded yacht as a toy, and rather an
amusing one, and was daily more convinced of the prescient shrewdness of
her cousin, Lord Eskdale.
Tancred was going to give them a fish dinner! A what? A sort of
banquet which might have served for the marriage feast of Neptune and
Amphitrite, and be commemorated by a constellation; and which ought
to have been administered by the Nereids and the Naiads; terrines of
turtle, pools of water _souchee_, flounders of every hue, and eels in
every shape, cutlets of salmon, salmis of carp, ortolans represented by
whitebait, and huge roasts carved out of the sturgeon. The appetite is
distracted by the variety of objects, and tantalised by the restlessness
of perpetual solicitation; not a moment of repose, no pause for
enjoyment; eventually, a feeling of satiety, without satisfaction, and
of repletion without sustenance; till, at night, gradually recovering
from the whirl of the anomalous repast, famished yet incapable of
flavour, the tortured memory can only recall with an effort, that it has
dined off pink champagne and brown bread and butter!
What a ceremony to be presided over by Tancred of Montacute; who, if
he deigned to dine at all, ought to have dined at no less a round table
than that of King Arthur. What a consummation of a sublime project!
What a catastrophe of a spiritual career! A Greenwich party and a tavern
bill!
All the world now is philosophical, and therefore they can account for
this disaster. Without doubt we are the creatures of circumstances; and,
if circumstances take the shape of a charming woman, who insists upon
sailing in your yacht, which happens to to be at Blackwall or Greenwich,
it is not easy to discover how the inevitable consequences can be
avoided. It would hardly do, off the Nore, to present your mistress
with a sea-pie, or abruptly remind your farewell friends and sorrowing
parents of their impending loss by suddenly serving up soup hermetically
sealed, and roasting the embalmed joint, which ought only to have smoked
amid the ruins of Thebes or by the cataracts of Nubia.
There are, however, two sides of every picture; a party may be pleasant,
and even a fish dinner not merely a whirl of dishes and a clash of
plates. The guests may be not too numerous, and well assorted; the
attendance not too devoted, yet regardful; the weather may be charming,
which is a great thing, and the giver of the dinner may be charmed, and
that is everything.
The party to see the Basilisk was not only the most agreeable of the
season, but the most agreeable ever known. They all said so when they
came back. Mr. Vavasour, who was there, went to all his evening parties;
to the assembly by the wife of a minister in Carlton Terrace; to a rout
by the wife of the leader of opposition in Whitehall; to a literary
soiree in Westminster, and a brace of balls in Portman and Belgrave
Squares; and told them all that they were none of them to be compared
to the party of the morning, to which, it must be owned, he had greatly
contributed by his good humour and merry wit. Mrs. Coningsby declared to
every one that, if Lord Monta-cute would take her, she was quite ready
to go to Jerusalem; such a perfect vessel was the Basilisk, and such an
admirable sailor was Mrs. Coningsby, which, considering that the river
was like a mill-pond, according to Tancred's captain, or like a mirror,
according to Lady Bertie and Bellair, was not surprising. The duke
protested that he was quite glad that Mon-tacute had taken to yachting,
it seemed to agree with him so well; and spoke of his son's future
movements as if there were no such place as Palestine in the world. The
sanguine duchess dreamed of Cowes regattas, and resolved to agree to
any arrangement to meet her son's fancy, provided he would stay at home,
which she convinced herself he had now resolved to do.
'Our cousin is so wise,' she said to her husband, as they were
returning. 'What could the bishop mean by saying that Tancred was a
visionary? I agree with you, George, there is no counsellor like a man
of the world.'
'I wish M. de Sidonia had come,' said Lady Bertie and Bellair, gazing
from the window of the Trafalgar on the moonlit river with an expression
of abstraction, and speaking in a tone almost of melancholy.
'I also wish it, since you do,' said Tancred. 'But they say he goes
nowhere. It was almost presumptuous in me to ask him, yet I did so
because you wished it.'
'I never shall know him,' said Lady Bertie and Bellair, with some
vexation.
'He interests you,' said Tancred, a little piqued.
'I had so many things to say to him,' said her ladyship.
'Indeed!' said Tancred; and then he continued, 'I offered him every
inducement to come, for I told him it was to meet you; but perhaps if
he had known that you had so many things to say to him, he might have
relented.'
'So many things! Oh! yes. You know he has been a great traveller; he has
been everywhere; he has been at Jerusalem.'
'Fortunate man!' exclaimed Tancred, half to himself. 'Would I were
there!'
'Would we were there, you mean,' said Lady Bertie, in a tone of
exquisite melody, and looking at Tancred with her rich, charged eyes.
His heart trembled; he was about to give utterance to some wild words,
but they died upon his lips. Two great convictions shared his being:
the absolute necessity of at once commencing his pilgrimage, and the
persuasion that life, without the constant presence of this sympathising
companion, must be intolerable. What was to be done? In his long
reveries, where he had brooded over so many thoughts, some only of which
he had as yet expressed to mortal ear, Tancred had calculated, as he
believed, every combination of obstacle which his projects might have
to encounter; but one, it now seemed, he had entirely omitted, the
influence of woman. Why was he here? Why was he not away? Why had he
not departed? The reflection was intolerable; it seemed to him even
disgraceful. The being who would be content with nothing less than
communing with celestial powers in sacred climes, standing at a tavern
window gazing on the moonlit mudbanks of the barbarous Thames, a river
which neither angel nor prophet had ever visited! Before him, softened
by the hour, was the Isle of Dogs! The Isle of Dogs! It should at least
be Cyprus!
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