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3 A CONTINENTAL HOLIDAY
‘I feel now that it is not prejudice when I declare that England with all her imperfections is worth all the world together.’
HAVING READILY ACCEPTED the Austens’ suggestion of a Continental holiday, Disraeli was equally ready to borrow the money to pay for it and, having made arrangements to do so, he wrote the first of his reports describing his journey to his father on 9 August:
My dear Father, We reached Paris Sunday afternoon and are now in the Rue de Rivoli, the best situation here…Paris is delightful. I never was so much struck with anything in the whole course of my life…I expected another London but there are no points of resemblance. I did not expect in so short a distance to have met such a contrariety of manners and life…* I am going to the Louvre this morning and to the Opera this evening…I have not kept my journal, but of course shall…God bless you.
Yours most affectionately,
B. Disraeli.1
A fortnight or so later, on 21 August from Geneva, he wrote again, assuring his father that the ‘unparalleled heat of the season’ did not affect him in the least, and that he had not had ‘a day’s nor an hour’s illness’ since he had left England: he felt ‘ten thousand times better’ than he had done for the past three years. He would, no doubt, have enjoyed the trip more had Austen been a more entertaining companion and had not Sara been so coyly flirtatious, so ready to speak French even more quickly than she did English, and had she not kept so critical an eye on the amount of Burgundy he drank while affecting to be amused by it.2
From Geneva, Disraeli wrote again to his father:
I take a row now every night with Maurice, Lord Byron’s celebrated boatman [who] is very handsome and very vain, but has been made so by the English, of whom he is a regular pet…He talks of nothing but Lord Byron…He told me that in the night of the famous storm described in the third Canto of C[hilde] H[arold], had they been out five minutes more the boat must have been wrecked. He told Lord Byron of the danger of such a night voyage, and the only answer which B. made was stripping quite naked and folding round him a great robe de chambre so that in case of wreck he was ready prepared to swim immediately…
One day Byron sent for him and, sitting down in the boat, he put a pistol on each side (which was his invariable practice) and then gave him 300 napoleons, ordering him to row to Chillon. He then had two torches lighted in the dungeon and wrote for two hours and a half. On coming out, the gendarme who guarded the castle humbly asked for quelque-chose à boire. ‘Give him a napoleon,’ said his Lordship. ‘De trop, milor,’ said Maurice, who being but recently installed in his stewardship was somewhat mindful of his master’s interest. ‘Do you know who I am?’ rejoined the master, ‘Give it to him and tell him that the donor is Lord Byron!’ This wonderful piece of information must have produced a great effect on the poor miserable tippling gendarme. But in the slightest thing was Byron, by Maurice’s account, most ludicrously ostentatious. He gave him one day five napoleons for a swimming race across the lake. At the sight of the club foot Maurice thought he was sure to win, but his Lordship gained by five minutes.
Byron, he says, was not a quick swimmer, but he was never exhausted, by which means he generally won when the distance was great. One morning Maurice called for him very early to swim. Byron brought to the boat his breakfast, consisting of cold duck, &c., and three or four bottles of wine, and then amused himself, while they were sailing to the appointed place, by throwing the provisions gradually into the water. Upon this, honest Maurice gently hinted that he had not himself breakfasted, and that he should swim much better if he had some portion of his Lordship’s superfluity. ‘Friend Maurice,’ said B., ‘it ill becomes true Christians to think of themselves; I shall give you none. You see I eat no breakfast myself; do you refrain also for the sake of the fishes.’ He then continued his donations to the pikes (which here are beautiful) and would not bestow a single crumb on his companion. ‘This is all very well,’ says Maurice, ‘but his Lordship forgot one little circumstance. He had no appetite; I had.’ He says that he never saw a man eat so little as B. in all his life, but that he would drink three or four bottles of the richest wines for his breakfast.3
According to Sara Austen, Disraeli also refused to stint himself with wine. ‘He seems to enjoy everything,’ she told his sister, ‘and has just said High Mass for a third bottle of Burgundy.’4
‘Mrs A[usten] is very well,’ Disraeli reported in turn to his father. ‘I hope to God my mother is better. Love to all.’
A fortnight or so later, Disraeli gave a further report to his father from Milan, describing the ‘painfully sublime’ scenery of the Alps which had also deeply impressed so many travellers from the north in the earlier days of the Grand Tour when one such tourist ‘started with affright’ as he obtained the first glimpse of their ‘awful and tremendous amphitheatre’.
‘We gazed till our eyes ached, and yet dared not withdraw them from the passing wonders,’ Disraeli told his father, having driven across the Simplon Pass which had been created on Napoleon’s orders some twenty-five years before. ‘Nothing could be more awful than the first part of our passage; the sublimity of the scenery was increased by the partial mists and the gusts of rain. Nothing is more terrific than the near roar of a cataract which is covered by a mist. It is horrible.’5
The journey through the Alps was interrupted by an excursion to the Great St Bernard, so Disraeli recalled years later, and ‘the brotherhood, on hearing that a young Englishman was in the hospice, expressed an anxious desire to see me, and I waited on the Superior. I found that all the anxiety arose from a desire to hear how the Thames Tunnel [work upon which had begun some years before and was not completed until 1843] had succeeded. I had to confess that I had never seen it, and I afterwards reflected that one must travel to learn what really is to be seen in one’s own country, and resolved at once on my return to supply the omission. But, do you know, I have never seen it yet.’6
When we arrived at the summit of the road the weather cleared [Disraeli continued his account in his letter to his father] and we found ourselves surrounded by snow. The scenery here and for a mile or two before was perfect desolation, cataracts coursing down crumbled avalanches whose horrible surface was only varied by the presence of one or two blasted firs. Here in this dreary and desolate scene burst forth a small streak of blue sky, the harbinger of the Italian heaven. The contrast on descending into Italy is wonderfully striking…the purple mountains, the glittering lakes, the cupola’d convents, the many-windowed villas crowning luxuriant-wooded hills, the undulation of shore, the projecting headland, the receding bay, the roadside uninclosed, yet bounded with walnut and vine and fig and acacia and almond trees bending down under the load of their fruit, the wonderful effect of light and shade, the trunks of every tree looking black as ebony…the thousand villages each with a tall, thin tower, the large melons trailing over walls, and, above all, the extended prospect, are so striking after the gloom of alpine passes.7
By way of Lake Maggiore, Disraeli and his friends came upon Lake Como, ‘a gem’, the shore of which was ‘covered with glittering palaces’, one of which was the Villa d’Este, the residence of the late Queen Caroline, the detested, lubricious German wife of King George IV, whose antics with her major-domo and others of her entourage had led to her conduct being examined by the House of Lords.
‘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.’8
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’9 – 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;* 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.10
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”’.*11
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.’12
‘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.† 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.13
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 £150.14 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.15
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”.’16
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’.17
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.’18
4 MENTAL BREAKDOWN
‘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’.1 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.’2 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.3
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.4
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.’5 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.’6
Enjoying her role as trusted amanuensis, Sara Austen encouraged Disraeli in his work; and when the idea of a satire on the Utilitarians, which was at the same time to ridicule the novel of fashionable life, came into his mind, she greeted it with her usual enthusiasm. ‘Mind you write Pop,’ [The Voyage of Captain Popanilla] she wrote to him while she was still in Lichfield. ‘I shall want to work when I get home.’7
He settled down to work with an enthusiasm which had seemed to have deserted him, writing with his former speed and energy, composing a fantasy about an island named Fantasie, the inhabitants of which, in naked innocence, spend much of their time making love, just as Vivian Grey would, no doubt, have liked to do with the beautiful Violet Fane, a character in the earlier book in which – at a significant picnic in a passage excised in later editions – a ‘facile knife’ sinks ‘without effort into a bird’s plump breast, discharging a cargo of rich stuffed balls of the most fascinating flavour’.
Popanilla, dedicated to Robert Plumer Ward – who told its author that it was equal to Swift’s Tale of a Tub – was published by Henry Colburn in June 1828, and was greeted with even less éclat than the second part of Vivian Grey, receiving but two reviews, both of them short. Cast down by this reception, Disraeli fell ill again and felt no better when his parents took him to Lyme Regis for the benefit of the sea air. Sarah D’Israeli did not know ‘what to say to comfort’ him; nor did William Meredith, his sister’s fiancé; nor yet did Isaac D’Israeli, who wrote:
My son’s life within the last year and a half with a very slight exception, has been a blank in his existence. His complaint is one of those perplexing cases which remain uncertain and obscure till they are finally got rid of. Meanwhile patience and resignation must be his lot.8
Concerned about the ‘precarious health’ of Benjamin and other members of his family, so he told Robert Southey, Isaac D’Israeli decided to ‘quit London with all its hourly seductions’ and to take a house in the country. In the summer of 1829, therefore, the D’Israelis gave up the house in Bloomsbury and moved to Bradenham, a handsome Queen Anne house with over 1,300 acres at the foot of the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire, a few miles from High Wycombe, which was itself some three hours’ coach journey from London.
In the front of the hall [Disraeli was to write of this property] huge gates of iron, highly wrought, and bearing an ancient date as well as the shield of a noble house opened on a village green round which were clustered the cottages of the parish with only one exception, and that was the vicarage house, a modern building, not without taste, surrounded by a small but brilliant garden…Behind the hall the country was common land but picturesque…It had once been a beech forest.9
Isaac D’Israeli settled down to country life with surprising speed and contentment; so did his daughter Sarah, who was often to be seen in the little village taking food and presents to the poor and sick and giving orders to – and taking advice from – the gardeners. Her younger brothers, Ralph, now aged twenty, and James, sixteen, were also happy at Bradenham.
Benjamin, too, liked Bradenham, and he spoke fondly of its trees, its beeches and junipers and its wild cherries.
He told Benjamin Austen in October 1829 that he was ‘desperately ill’. But, even so, he ‘hoped to be in town in a day or two – incog, of course, because of the duns eager to nab [him]’. He would then find his way to Austen’s chambers and shake his ‘honest hand.’
He had begun another book, The Young Duke, which, so he told William Meredith, was ‘a series of scenes, every one of which would make the fortune of a fashionable novel. I am confident of its success, and that it will complete the corruption of the public taste.’10
Indeed, he was sufficiently confident to approach John Murray, suggesting an interview and assuring the publisher that it had always been his intention, should it ever be his ‘fate to write anything calculated to arrest public attention’, that the house of Murray ‘should be the organ of introducing it to public notice’.
Not surprisingly, Murray declined the offer of an interview but ‘assured Mr Disraeli that, if he cared to submit the manuscript, the proposal would be entertained with the strictest honour and impartiality’.
This was scarcely more encouraging than the comment that Issac D’Israeli was quoted as having made when informed that the title of his son’s new book was to be The Young Duke. ‘Young Duke! What does Ben know of dukes?’11
Nor were others, to whom the manuscript was shown, as enthusiastic as its author had hoped they would be. Colburn’s reader, who was asked for an opinion in March 1830, had reservations; so, too, had Edward Lytton Bulwer, whose Pelham had been published with great success two years before and whose opinion and friendship Disraeli valued. He was much cast down by these criticisms; but Colburn gave him £500 for the book and, when it was published, the critics were kind and some were enthusiastic.
The Westminster Review told its readers that ‘to parasites, sycophants, toad-eaters, and humble companions’, the book would be ‘full of comfort and instruction in their callings’. But this verdict was exceptional. As his sister told him, without overdue flattery, most of the weekly and Sunday papers ‘reviewed it with excessive praise’. She herself thought it was ‘most excellent’. ‘There is not a dull half page…One reading has repaid me for months of suspense, and that is saying everything if you knew how much my heart is wrapt up in your fame.’
As for Disraeli himself, he protested that he did not care a jot about The Young Duke. ‘I never staked any fame on it.’ It was, he said later, the only one of his books not written from his own feelings and experience. It is the fantastical story of a young coxcomb, George Augustus Frederick, Duke of St James’s, a sprig of one of the richest families in Europe, who is corrupted by society, but redeemed when he abandons rebellion for conformity and accepts the responsibilities of his inheritance.
Disraeli was much more interested in a project which he had been considering for some time, a tour in the East. He went up to London occasionally to discuss his plans with Meredith, who was to accompany him, travelling incognito, as he put it, for fear he might be seen and dunned by the various people to whom he owed money. He was careful, in fact, not to let his plans become public knowledge and thus alert his creditors to his intention of going abroad again and giving them good reason for demanding the settlement of his debts before he went.
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