Disraeli: A Personal History

‘The Villa’s apartments are left in exactly the same state’ as she had left them to return to England to claim her rights as Queen five or so years before. ‘There is the theatre in which she acted Columbine, and the celebrated statues of Adam and Eve carved with the yet more celebrated fig leaves. It is a villa of the first grade, and splendidly adorned, but the ornaments are, without an exception, so universally indelicate that it was painful to view them in the presence of a lady…Here, if they possessed any interest, might you obtain thousands of stories of her late Majesty, but the time is passed, thank God, for them. Our riots in her favour are the laughing stock of Italy.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

Having examined everything worth seeing in Milan, and admired the dress of his fellow dandy Count Gicogna – ‘the leader of the ton at Milan, a dandy of genius worthy of Brummell’

(#litres_trial_promo) – Disraeli and his friends moved on to Brescia, then to Verona, which was, so he said, ‘full of pictures which have never been painted’, then on to Vicenza, where the ‘famous Palladian palaces’ were ‘in decay’ and disgustingly smelly. ‘They are built of brick,’ he wrote, ‘sometimes plastered, occasionally white-washed; the red material is constantly appearing and vies in hideous colour with the ever offensive roof. It is a miserable thing that a man worthy of Athens or Rome should have worked with such materials.’ The Villa Rotunda, which had served as a model for the Earl of Burlington’s Chiswick House, was in an advanced state of dilapidation.

From Vicenza Disraeli and his friends set out for Padua and, following the course of the Brenta, arrived in Venice on 8 September as the sun was setting ‘on a grand fête day’.

They took a gondola to their hotel, which was, so Disraeli told his father,

once the proud residence of the Bernadinis, a family which has given more than one Doge to the old Republic;

(#litres_trial_promo) the floors of our rooms were of marble, the hangings of satin, the ceilings, painted by Tintoretto and his scholars, full of Turkish triumphs and trophies, the chairs of satin and the gilding, though of two hundred years’ duration, as brightly burnished as the new mosaic invention. After a hasty dinner we rushed to the mighty Place of St Mark. It was crowded. Two Greek and one Turkish ship of war were from accidental circumstances in port and their crews mingled with the other spectators…Tired with travelling we left the gay scene but the moon was so bright that a juggler was conjuring in a circle under our window, and an itinerant Italian opera performing by our bridge. Serenades were constant during the whole night; indeed music is never silent in Venice. I wish I could give you an idea of the moonlight there, but that is impossible. Venice by moonlight is an enchanted city; the floods of silver light upon the moresco architecture, the perfect absence of all harsh sounds of carts and carriages, the never-ceasing music on the waters produced an effect on the mind which cannot be experienced, I am sure, in any other city in the world.

(#litres_trial_promo)

The next five days were spent in sightseeing and, in a later letter to his father, Disraeli described his impressions of the Doges’ Palace – in which ‘in every room you are reminded of the glory and the triumphs of the republic’ – and of St Mark’s, that ‘Christian mosque’, ‘a pile of precious stones’, outside which the four ‘brazen horses’ – not long since returned from Paris, having been looted on Napoleon’s orders – ‘amble, not prance as some have described them’.

Napoleon had also given orders for the gates of the Ghetto to be pulled down and for the Jews to live where they liked. Many Jews had chosen to remain, however, and Disraeli’s great-aunt was still living there. If he knew of her presence, he made no effort to seek her out; nor did he try to see his Basevi cousins in Verona; nor yet did he go to Cento where his grandfather had been born.

‘According to common opinion,’ however, Disraeli ‘saw all that ought to be seen but never felt less inclined to quit a place’ than he felt on leaving Venice for Bologna. On his way there he made an excursion to the tomb of Petrarch at Arqua and from Ferrara he went to Tasso’s cell. ‘The door posts of this gloomy dungeon are covered with the names of its visitors,’ he wrote. ‘Here scratched with a great nail on the brick wall I saw scrawled “Byron” and immediately beneath it, in a neat banker’s hand was written “Sam Rogers”’.

(#litres_trial_promo)

(#litres_trial_promo)

Reluctant as he had been to leave Bologna also, Disraeli found Florence ‘a most delightful city’ and astonishingly cheap; ‘an English family of the highest respectability may live in Florence with every convenience and keep a handsome carriage, horses, liveries etc. for five hundred a year’, that was to say in present-day terms about £17,000 a year.

‘You may live in a palace built by Michael Angelo,’ he continued, ‘keep a villa two miles from the city in a most beautiful situation, with vineyards, fruit and pleasure gardens, keep two carriages, have your opera box, and live in every way as the first Florentine nobility, go to Court, have your own night for receiving company on less than a thousand a year.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

‘There are some clever artists and sculptors in Florence,’ Disraeli told his father:

Among the latter since the death of Canova, Bertolini [Bartolini] is reckoned the most eminent in Italy.

(#litres_trial_promo) He is a man of genius. I had the honour of a long conversation with him…He is a friend of Chantrey but the god of his idolatry, and indeed of all Italians, is Flaxman.

In one of my speculations I have been disappointed. In the Pitti Palace there is the most beautiful portrait of Charles I by Vandyke, the most pleasing and noble likeness that I have seen. It is a picture highly esteemed. I engaged a miniature painter here to make me an exquisite copy of this picture with which I intended to surprise you. After a week’s work he has brought it today, but has missed the likeness! And yet he was the Court painter, Signor Carloni. I have refused to take the work and am embroiled in a row but in this country firmness is alone necessary and the Italians let you do what you like, so I’ve no fear as to the result. My mortification and disappointment, however, are extreme.

(#litres_trial_promo)

This letter was written on 29 September 1826. The next was written in Turin on 10 October and in it, having given his impressions of Pisa – ‘where the Cathedral and its more wonderful Baptistry, the leaning tower and the Campo Santo rivetted [his] attention’ – he said that he expected to be at Dover on the 24th, having, according to Austen’s calculations, travelled over two thousand miles, and his share of the expenses, including £20 for prints and other purchases, being no more than £150.

(#litres_trial_promo) On 15 October he wrote to his sister from Lyons:

Nothing can have been more prosperous than our whole journey. Not a single contretemps and my compagnons de voyage uniformly agreeable. Everything that I wished has been realized. I have got all the kind of knowledge that I desired…I had a great row about the portrait of Charles 1st, but was quite successful. The consequence is that I have got a new miniature in which the likeness is exactly hit and at a cheaper rate…I am glad that I at last get some account of my mother – my best love to her; we must meet soon. My father says that he has been very idle and I fear from his tone that I am to believe him. I have been just the reverse, but I would throw all my papers into the Channel only to hear that he had written fifty pages.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Mrs Austen, in a letter to Sarah D’Israeli, confirmed that the journey had passed without the least disagreement. ‘Your brother is so easily pleased, so accommodating, so amusing, and so actively kind, that I shall always reflect upon the domestic part of our journey with the greatest pleasure.’ Indeed, Benjamin, so Sara Austen said, had behaved ‘excellently, except when there is a button, or rather buttons, to be put on his shirt; then he is violently bad, and this happens almost daily. I said once “They cannot have been good at first”; and now he always threatens to “tell my Mother you have abused my linen”.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

Travelling homewards through France, Disraeli and his friends left the main road to go to see the Layard family. Austen Henry Layard, the future excavator of Nineveh, was then nine years old. In later life he retained ‘a vivid recollection’ of Disraeli’s appearance, ‘his black curly hair, his affected manner and his somewhat fantastic dress’.

(#litres_trial_promo)

His holiday was almost over now; and, as he approached the Channel, Disraeli congratulated himself upon having seen five capitals and twelve great cities, and, although he might well see more cities, he could not hope to see more ‘varieties of European nature’. ‘I feel now,’ he added, ‘that it is not prejudice when I declare that England with all her imperfections is worth all the world together, and I hope it is not misanthropy when I feel that I love lakes and mountains better than courts and cities, and trees better than men.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

4 MENTAL BREAKDOWN (#ulink_94c66ed8-ae8c-5d89-ae9c-fa133e530d95)

‘I was bled, blistered, boiled, poisoned, electrified, galvanised; and, at the end of the year, found myself with exactly the same oppression on my brain.’

AFTER HIS RETURN TO LONDON, Disraeli continued to see much of Sara Austen, with whom he went for walks in Bloomsbury and by whom he was frequently invited to dinner at the Austens’ house in Guildford Street. He was working hard on the second part of Vivian Grey, which, as with the first part, Mrs Austen copied out for him from the hastily written sheets of paper on which the author’s handwriting was often so difficult to decipher that she had to make her own sense of it.

When part two of the book was published in February 1827, it did not arouse much enthusiasm. William Gladstone expressed a fairly common opinion when he called ‘the first quarter (me jud.) extremely clever, the rest trash’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Henry Crabb Robinson, the journalist, could not bring himself to finish it and resolved not to try to read anything else by the same author. The author himself conceded that it did not make very satisfactory reading, and that in parts it was actually unintelligible and, in general, fragmentary and formless. It did, however, contain occasionally amusing remarks as, for instance, ‘Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Disraeli had grown tired of the character of Vivian Grey and in part two he had created a new hero, Beckendorf, whom most readers did not find convincing.

However, he received £500 from the publisher, Henry Colburn, for this sequel to the book, and was consequently able to settle an outstanding bill for £140 which he had owed John Murray. But he could not pay his other debts: he and Thomas Evans, his fellow clerk at Frederick’s Place, still owed Robert Messer well over £1,000 which had been incurred by their South American speculations.

Soon after the publication of the disappointing second part of Vivian Grey, Disraeli fell ill again and, as in the case of a manic depressive, his previous high spirits suddenly collapsed, and from excited gaiety he sank into a trough of gloomy despair. The onset of the illness was heralded by an alarming ticking noise in his ears such as that endured by those suffering from tinnitus. ‘From the tick of a watch,’ Disraeli wrote, ‘it assumed the loud confused moaning of a bell tolling in a storm…It was impossible to think. I walked about the room. It became louder and louder. It seemed to be absolutely deafening. I could compare it to nothing but the continuous roar of a cataract.’ At the same time he felt confused and weak; in the morning he fainted while dressing; the noise in his head he ‘could only describe as the rushing of blood into his brain’. In his conscious state he was ‘not always assured’ of his own identity, ‘or even existence’. He would shout aloud to be sure that he was, indeed, alive; and he would take down one of his books to look at the title page to be sure that he was not just a character in a nightmare.

(#litres_trial_promo)

He could not write; he could not bring himself to look into his legal textbooks. In 1827, he told Benjamin Austen that he was just as ill as ever; he felt that he was in the situation of those ‘jackanapes at school who wrote home to their parents every week to tell them that they have nothing to say’; and when, in the following month, he went with the Austens to stay in a house in Essex which his father had taken for the autumn, he became more ill than ever.

(#litres_trial_promo)

He was still ‘quite idle’, so he told Sharon Turner in March 1828, still ‘decidedly an invalid’, and ‘profoundly depressed’, undergoing treatment by a succession of doctors who prescribed various and often contradictory treatments for a condition diagnosed as ‘a chronic inflammation of the membranes of the brain’. ‘I was bled,’ he said, ‘blistered, boiled, poisoned, electrified, galvanised; and, at the end of the year, found myself with exactly the same oppression on my brain.’

One of the doctors who treated him was Buckley Bolton, a young physician with a fashionable practice, who prescribed large doses of digitalis, a tincture derived from the leaf of the wild foxglove, intended to strengthen the involuntary muscular contraction of the muscle fibres in the heart. It is a depressant and was, no doubt, responsible for the moods of despair into which Disraeli sank. But Bolton had an attractive wife, Clara, whom Disraeli was to invite to stay at Bradenham, the house to which his father and family were soon to move, and with whom he was to have an affair.

At the same time he began to resent or conceive dislike for various friends or relations, even, for a time, for his father, who makes a recognizable appearance in Vivian Grey, not only as Vivian’s father, but also as the tiresome, pedantic Mr Sherborne, a man who disapproves of most of his contemporaries and even more of those ‘puppies’ who think ‘every man’s a fool who’s older than themselves’.

Disraeli himself believed that his mental breakdown was caused by frustration at his inability to achieve the reputation he felt he deserved. ‘Whether or not I shall ever do anything which may mark me out from the crowd I know not,’ he told Sharon Turner. ‘I am one of those to whom moderate reputation can give no pleasure and who, in all probability, am incapable of achieving a great one.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He was also, he might well have added, incapable of throwing off the anti-semitic prejudices which he believed lay in the way of his achieving a great reputation in a gentile world.

It has also been suggested that ‘sexual frustration deepened his depression’. Certainly Sara Austen played an elaborate, teasing game with ‘My dear Ben’, keeping secrets from his family (when out of London, she wrote to him at her own address in Guildford Street) and especially from his sister, Sarah, who was determined not to be replaced as the most important woman in her brother’s life. ‘They [his family] need not know that I have written to you first,’ Mrs Austen wrote from Lichfield in April 1828, ‘and I will so manage my letter to Sarah that she shall seem to have the preference.’

(#litres_trial_promo)