When twenty-one years of age Benjamin Disraeli produced “Vivian Gray.”  The woman in the case was Mrs. Austen, wife of a prosperous London solicitor.  This lady was handsome, a brilliant talker, a fine musician and an amateur artist of no mean ability.  She was much older than Disraeli—­she must have been in order to comprehend that the young man’s frivolity was pretense, and his foppery affectation.  A girl of his own age, whose heart-depths had not been sounded by experience, would have fallen in love with the foppery (or else despised it—­which is often the same thing); but Mrs. Austen, mature in years, with a decade of London “seasons” behind her, having met every possible kind of man Europe had to offer, discovered that the world did not know Ben Disraeli at all.  She saw that the youth did not reveal his true self, and that instead of courting society for its own sake he had a supreme contempt for it.  She intuitively knew that he was seething in discontent, and with prophetic vision she knew that his restless power and his ambition would yet make him a marked figure in the world of letters or politics, or both.

For love as a passion, or supreme sentiment, ruling one’s life, Disraeli had no sympathy.  He shunned love for fear it might bind him hand and foot.  Love not only is blind, but love blinds its votary, and Disraeli, knowing this, fled for freedom when the trail grew warm.  A man madly in love is led, subdued—­imagine Mephisto captured, crying it out on his knees with his head in a woman’s lap!

But Mrs. Austen was happily married, the mother of a family, and occupied a position high in London society.

Marriage with her was out of the question, and scandal and indiscretion equally so—­Ben Disraeli felt safe with Mrs. Austen.  With her he put off his domino and grew simple and confidential.

And so the lady, doubtless a bit flattered—­for she was a woman—­set herself to push on the hazard of new fortunes.  She encouraged him to write his novel of “Vivian Gray”—­discussed every phase of it, read chapter after chapter as they were produced, and by her gentle encouragement and warm sympathy fired the mind of the young man to the point of production.

The book is absurd in plot, and like most first books, flashy and overdrawn.  And yet there is a deal of power in it, and the thinly veiled characters were speedily pointed out as living personages.  Literary London went agog, and Mrs. Austen fanned the flame by inviting “the set” to her drawing-room to hear the great author read from his amusing work.  The best feature of the book, and probably the saving feature, is that the central figure in the plot is Disraeli, himself, and upon his own head the author plays his shafts of wit and ridicule.  The impertinence and impudence which he himself manifested were parodied, caricatured and played upon, to the great delight of the uninitiated rabble, who gave themselves much credit for having made a discovery.