Thinking of Disraeli as a maker of stories, one reads of his immense vogue about the middle of the last century and reflects sagely upon the change of literary fashions.  The magic is gone for the reader now.  Such claim as he can still make is most favorably estimated by “Coningsby,” “Sybil” and “Tancred,” all published within four years, and constituting a trilogy of books in which the follies of polite society and the intimacies of politics are portrayed with fertility and facility.  The earlier “Henrietta Temple” and “Venetia,” however fervid in feeling and valuable for the delineation of contemporary character, are not so characteristic.  Nor are the novels of his last years, “Lothair” and “Endymion,” in any way better than those of his younger days.  That the political trilogy have still a certain value as studies of the time is beyond argument.  Also, they have wit, invention and a richly pictorial sense for setting, together with flamboyant attraction of style and a solid substratum of thought.  One recognizes often that an athletic mind is at play in them.  But they do not now take hold, whatever they once did; an air of the false-literary is over them, it is not easy to read them as true transcripts from life.  To get a full sense of this, turn to literally contemporaneous books like Dickens’ “David Copperfield” and “Hard Times”; compared with such, Disraeli and all his world seem clever pastiche.  Personal taste may modify this statement:  it can hardly reverse it.  It would be futile to explain the difference by saying that Disraeli was some eight years before Dickens or that he dealt with another and higher class of society.  The difference goes deeper:  it is due to the fact that one writer was writing in the spirit of the age with his face to the future and so giving a creative representation of its life; whereas the other was painting its manners and only half in earnest:  playing with literature, in sooth.  A man like Dickens is married to his art; Disraeli indulges in a temporary liaison with letters.  There is, too, in the Lothair-Endymion kind of literature a fatal resemblance to the older sentimental and grandiose fiction of the eighteenth century:  an effect of plush and padding, an atmosphere of patchouli and sachet powder.  It has the limitation that fashion ever sets; it is boudoir novel-writing:  cabinet literature in both the social and political sense.  As Agnes Repplier has it:  “Lothair is beloved by the female aristocracy of Great Britain; and mysterious ladies, whose lofty souls stoop to no conventionalities, die happy with his kisses on their lips.”  It would be going too far perhaps to say that this type never existed in life, for Richardson seems to have had a model in mind in drawing Grandison; but it hardly survives in letters, unless we include “St. Elmo” and “Under Two Flags” in that denomination.

To sum it all up:  For most of us Disraeli has become hard reading.  This is not to say that he cannot still be read with profit as one who gives us insight concerning his day; but his gorgeous pictures and personages have faded woefully, where Trollope’s are as bright as ever; and the latter is right when he said that Lord Beaconsfield’s creatures “have a flavor of paint and unreality.”