FICTION
The politician's plot
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`Disraeli is uncannily prescient about history and his observations are insightful, to say the least.'
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IT is not often that a distinguished politician bends his back to the task of crafting a work of fiction. This was, however, something that the First Earl of Beaconsfield, Benjamin Disraeli was perfectly adept at even as the cut and thrust of politics dominated the clock in his life. It is indeed an absorbing task, this attempt to follow the course of Disraeli's pen even as his 200th birth anniversary approaches us, this date being December 21, 2004.
Benjamin Disraeli was the British Prime Minister in 1868 and from 1874-1880. It is necessary to note that this charismatic reformer chose fiction as the medium to convey many of his important ideas to his countrymen. On pure literary merit Disraeli's novels, mainly the trilogy of Coningsby, Sybil, or the Two Nations and Tancred may not bear comparison with the works of the truly great political novelists. Men like Dostoevsky, Zamyatin, Orwell, Huxley and Koestler have all captured better almost every nuance of the "complex or aggregate of relationships of human beings in society". No, Disraeli, magnificent though he is, certainly cannot compete with these writers. It is, however, in the depiction of the conditions of life in England that the statesman-novelist truly shows his class.
Specific purpose
Disraeli's pen was accurate and penetrating, though at times idiosyncratic and it was wielded with a specific purpose in mind. As part of the reforming "Young England" campaign, Disraeli wished to extend the appeal of the Tory party to a much larger electorate. The emergence of a wider electorate was something that he anticipated with remarkable foresight and in his social satires such as Sybil, or the Two Nations Disraeli's opinions were welded to form a classic of its kind.
No one previously had articulated the existence of two totally antagonistic communities that represented "two nations" with such candour. Disraeli saw its dangers and wished to take steps to quickly defuse the gathering tensions. Sybil, or the Two Nations, which contains the key to Disraeli's mind, was first published in 1845 and is set during the period 1837-1844. It depicts the storms of Chartist agitation and social disturbance in England. The Chartist movement was, of course, a working class movement that wished to bring about equal political and social rights for all classes by legal means.
Here is a dramatic exchange between the aristocratic Egremont and a young stranger in Sybil. Egremont exclaims that "our queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed". The riposte is immediate. "Which nation?" asks the younger stranger, "for she reigns over two"... "Yes,"... "Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws." "You speak of — " said Egremont, hesitatingly. And the young stranger replies, "THE RICH AND THE POOR."
Pungent observations
The novel proceeds to contrast the selfishness of the aristocratic class with the nobility of the Chartist leader Walter Gerard and the journalist Stephen Morley, both "thoughtful representatives of the working class." Sybil, Gerard's daughter is a kind of Prince Myshkin, pure and idealistic but there is an element of reconciliation among the "two nations" in the plot when she eventually marries Charles Egremont, the broad minded young aristocrat.
Sybil is peppered with the pungent observations of Disraeli who, like a few enlightened others, saw that there was a possibility of unbridled violence and revolution in England if affairs remained as they were. Disraeli speaks of "a mortgaged aristocracy, a gambling foreign commerce, a home trade founded on a morbid competition, and a degraded people... " The plot itself seems not so much to matter today but Disraeli's version of British history and his quotable opinions on matters of the day will delight the reader with a keen interest in the course of human events.
In Sybil, published a full three years before the arrival of The Communist Manifesto, the Tory politician Disraeli has one of the characters to whom he is sympathetic say these lines — "The capitalist flourishes, he amasses immense wealth; we sink, lower and lower; lower than the beasts of burthen; for they are fed better than we are, cared for more. And it is just, for according to the present system they are more precious. And yet they tell us that the interests of Capital and of Labour are identical."
Uncanny prescience
Disraeli insisted that everything he portrayed in his novels was drawn from actual observation of life in his country. That makes his oeuvre all the more valuable today. He is uncannily prescient about history and his observations are insightful, to say the least. Partake of this passage on the heroine Sybil: "Sybil whose mind had been nurtured with great thoughts, and with whom success or failure alike partook of the heroic, who had hoped for triumph, but who was prepared for sacrifice, found to her surprise, that great thoughts have very little to do with the business of the world; that human affairs, even in an age of revolution, are the subject of compromise; and that the essence of compromise is littleness."
Benjamin Disraeli, First Earl of Beaconsfield, understood the horrors of exploitation and poverty very well but continued to justify imperialism. What Borges would have called a "magnificent irony". What we would perhaps call politics.
AJAY MENON
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