Читать книгу Disraeli: A Personal History - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 12

‘All the women are on my side and wear my colours.’

AT THE BEGINNING OF JUNE 1832, Disraeli went down from London to High Wycombe to begin his canvass of the constituency. The sitting members were Sir Thomas Baring, the financier, and the Hon. Robert John Smith, Lord Carrington’s son and heir who lived at Wycombe Abbey on the outskirts of the town, in which he had much influence, and who later became known as ‘glass-bottom Carrington’ because of his idée fixe that ‘an honourable part of his person was made of glass, so that he was afraid to sit thereon, and during the whole of his uneventful life, he persistently refused to sit whenever it was possible by any exercise of ingenuity to stand up or lie down’.¹

Having declared himself a Radical, Disraeli told Benjamin Austen that he took with him ‘strong recommendatory epistles’ from those stalwarts on the left, Daniel O’Connell, Joseph Hume and Francis Burdett. A few days later he wrote again to Austen, dating his letter from the Red Lion, the inn, now demolished, that stood in the High Street with a statute of a red lion on the portico: ‘I write you a hurried note after a day’s hard canvass. Whigs, Tories and Radicals, Quakers, Evangelicals, Abolition of Slavery, Reform, Conservatism, Corn Laws – here is hard work for one who is to please all parties. I make an excellent canvasser.’²

We are hard at it [he added in a letter to Mrs Austen]. Sir Thomas [Baring] you know has resigned [in order to contest a seat in Hampshire]. His son was talked of; I have frightened him off… Yesterday Colonel [Charles] Grey [son of the Prime Minister] came down with a hired mob and a band. Never was such a failure. After parading the town with his paid voices, he made a stammering speech of ten minutes from his phaeton. All Wycombe was assembled. Feeling it was the crisis, I jumped up on the portico of the Red Lion and gave it to them for an hour and 1/4. I can give you no idea of the effect. I made them all mad. A great many absolutely cried. I never made so many friends in my life or converted as many enemies. All the women are on my side and wear my colours, pink and white. The Colonel returned to town in the evening absolutely astounded out of his presence of mind; on dit never to appear again…If he comes I am prepared for him.³

Prone as Disraeli was to hyperbole, there seems no doubt that his speech, so much more fluent and dramatic than Grey’s, was well received, and that he was loudly cheered when, pointing to the head of the red lion on the inn’s portico, he said that when the poll was declared he would be there, and pointing to the tail, that his opponent would be there. He did not, however, convert a majority of those few men who were entitled to vote, since, although the Reform Bill had just become law, voting in this election was still confined to the names on the old register. When the result of the poll was announced, he had gathered but twelve votes; his opponent had twenty-three.⁴

Defiant in defeat, he made another long speech which almost resulted in a duel with Lord Nugent, a local magnate and convinced Whig, who considered himself insulted by him. More temperate and carefully reasoned was the address he issued on 3 December as an opening blast in his campaign in the election of the following year and in which he declared that he came forward once again, this time ‘wearing the badge of no party and the livery of no faction’.

In a speech made after a dinner given for him by his supporters, he declared, ‘I care not for party. I stand here without party. I plead the cause of the people.’ He was ‘a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad’.⁵

So confident was he of victory this time that he ordered a chair to be made in his electioneering colours so that he could be carried in triumph through the streets of the town by his jubilant supporters. But the electorate did not choose to have it so;^* and once again he was to be disappointed: on this second occasion Robert John Smith gained 179 votes, Colonel Grey 140 and Disraeli 119.

He did not accept his defeat gracefully: he declared that had ‘he let money fly’, he ‘would have come in’. ‘The election or rather contest did not cost me £80…and Grey not short of £800.’⁶

On 7 February, the disappointed candidate ‘went to the House of Commons to hear Bulwer [Radical Member for St Ives] adjourn the House’. ‘I was there yesterday, during the whole debate,’ he told Sara Austen. ‘Bulwer spoke, but he is physically disqualified as an orator; and, in spite of all his exertions, never can succeed…Between ourselves, I could floor them all. This entre nous; I was never more confident of anything than that I could carry everything before me in that House. The time will come…Grey spoke highly of my oratorical powers. Bulwer said he never heard “finer command of words”.’⁷

Disappointed but not cast down by his first forays into the political world, Disraeli plunged once more into the social world of London. He remained, of course, an apparently conceited dandy; but his underlying seriousness and his conversational gifts now became more widely recognized. He was a ‘very handsome young man’, in the opinion of Henry Layard, Sara Austen’s nephew, ‘with a countenance in which beauty of feature and intellectual expression were strikingly combined’.⁸ He was also, Layard might have added, still excessively self-regarding. His letters to his sister continued to assure her of his social success:

Yesterday I dined with the Nortons [the Hon. George and his wife, Caroline Norton]. It was her eldest brother’s birthday, who, she says, is the only respectable one of the family, and that is because he has a liver complaint. There were there the other brother Charles and the old Charles Sheridan, the uncle, and others. The only lady beside Mrs Norton, her sister Mrs Blackwood [later Lady Dufferin], also very handsome and very Sheridanic. She told me she was nothing. ‘You see Georgy’s the beauty, and Carry’s the wit, and I ought to be the good one but then I am not.’ I must say I liked her exceedingly; besides she knows all my works by heart and spouts whole pages…⁹

In the evening came Lady St Maur, and anything so splendid I never gazed upon. Even the handsomest family in the world, which I think the Sheridans are, all looked dull…

Mrs Norton sang and acted, and did everything that was delightful. Ossulston [son of the Earl of Tankerville] came in – a very fine singer, unaffected and good-looking. Old Mrs Sheridan – who, by the bye, is young and pretty, and authoress of Carwell – is my great admirer; in fact, the whole family have a very proper idea of my merits! and I like them all.¹⁰

Disraeli was at his most splendid. He was wearing a ‘black velvet coat lined with satin, purple trousers with a gold band running down the outside seam,’ Lady Dufferin recalled, insisting that there was no exaggeration in the description, ‘a scarlet waistcoat, long lace ruffles, falling down to the tips of his fingers, white gloves with several brilliant rings outside them, and long black ringlets rippling down upon his shoulders’.¹¹

Lady Dufferin also recalled Disraeli’s riposte to a remark of her ‘insufferable’ brother-in-law, the dissolute and pretentious barrister, the Hon. George Norton, who asked his guest to drink a particular kind of wine, saying he had never tasted anything so good before. Disraeli agreed that the wine was very good. ‘Well,’ said Norton, ‘I have got wine twenty times as good in my cellar.’ ‘No doubt, no doubt,’ said Disraeli, ‘but, my dear fellow, this is quite good enough for such canaille as you have got here today.’¹²

Three or four months after this dinner at the Nortons’, at the end of June 1833, Disraeli again wrote to his sister to assure her that his social life was as busy as ever: his table was ‘literally covered with invitations’, some from people he did not even know. He dined one day with the St Maurs, where he spoke to Lady Westmorland (‘very clever’) and decided that Lord St Maur had ‘great talent’, which developed itself in a domestic circle though otherwise he was ‘shy-mannered’. In the evening there was a good soirée at Lady Charleville’s, where he met Lady Aldborough, who was deaf; and he could not ‘bear deaf people’, who never could repeat what he had said ‘even to Princes’.

There was a prince that evening at Lady Charleville’s, the Prince of Canino, born Luciano Buonaparte. He met another Buonaparte at Mrs Wyndham’s, Joseph Buonaparte, Luciano’s eldest brother, with ‘his beautiful daughter’; and afterwards he went to the Caledonian Ball ‘in a dress from my Oriental collection’.¹³

‘London is emptying fast but gay,’ he wrote three weeks later, on 30 July. ‘Lady Cork [the eighty-seven-year-old widow of the seventh Earl of Cork] had two routs. All my best people, no blues [bluestockings]. At a concert at Mrs Mitford’s I was introduced to Malibran [Maria-Félicita Malibran, the operatic contralto] who is to be the heroine of my opera. She is a very interesting person.’ ‘My letters are shorter than Napoleon’s,’ he added in his letter to Sarah, ‘but I love you more than he did Josephine. I shall be down tomorrow.’

When he did get down to Bradenham that summer, he began writing an account of himself, at once a self-examination and a self-congratulation, in parts contradictory, in his ‘Mutilated Diary’.

‘I have passed the whole of this year in uninterrupted lounging and pleasure,’ he wrote. ‘My life has not been a happy one. Nature has given me an awful ambition with fiery passions. My life has been a struggle, with moments of rapture.’

My disposition is now indolent [he continued]. I wish to be idle and enjoy myself…[Yet] my career will probably be more energetic than ever, and the world will wonder at my ambition. Alas, I struggle from Pride. Yes! It is Pride that now prompts me, not Ambition. They shall not say I have failed.

I have not gained much in conversation with men. Bulwer is one of the few with whom my intellect comes into collision…Lockhart is good for tête-à-têtes…But he is overrated…The man from whom I have gained most in conversation is [Paul Emile] Botta…If I add to these my father, the list comprises the few men from whose conversation I have gained wisdom…

I make it a rule now never to throw myself open to men. I do not grudge them the knowledge I could impart…but, as I never get anything in return, I do not think the exertion necessary.

As a lively companion, of ceaseless entertainment and fun, no one, perhaps, equals Charles Mathews, the son of the comedian, but far exceeding his father, who is, I understand, jealous of him…

I can read characters at a glance; few men can deceive me.

My mind is a continental mind. It is a revolutionary mind. I am only truly great in action. If ever I am placed in a truly eminent position I shall prove this. I could rule the House of Commons although there would be a great prejudice against me at first.¹⁴

But now at Bradenham it was to poetry that he devoted many, if not most, of the waking hours of his life.

‘I live here like a hermit, and have scarcely seen my family,’ he told Sara Austen. ‘I rise at seven, and my day passes in study and composition.’ For a time he left Bradenham for Southend and there also, ‘living on snipes and riding a good deal’, he passed his days ‘in constant composition’.¹⁵

He had first conceived the idea for this great work of poetry, to be called the Revolutionary Epick, during his tour of the Middle East. ‘Standing upon Asia,’ he said, ‘and gazing upon Europe, with the broad Hellespont alone between us, and the shadow of night descending on the mountains, these mighty continents appeared to me, as it were, the rival principles of government that, at present, contend for the mastery of the world. “What!” I exclaimed, “Is the revolution of France a less important event than the siege of Troy? Is Napoleon a less interesting character than Achilles?”’¹⁶

After weeks of hard work he told Sara Austen that he had already written four thousand lines of verse and was ready to print them. ‘The whole of it is matured in my mind,’ he said, ‘though probably it could not be completed under thirty thousand lines.’ He sought her help in finishing it: ‘Are you sure a Creole is dark?’ he asked her about the Empress Josephine. ‘No matter, I will make her brunette. And what exactly is a sou-wester?’ He was ‘perfectly ignorant of the geography of the wind’ and had no atlas to which he could refer.¹⁷

In the third week of January 1834, the first canto having been finished, he offered to bore the Austens with a recitation of it one evening when they were on their own. Undeterred upon arrival at their house to find a party assembled for dinner, he took the floor to perform, in his own words, ‘the part of the importunate author’.

Henry Layard was among the guests and provided an account of that evening:

There was something irresistibly comic in the young man dressed in the fantastic, coxcombical costume that he then affected – velvet coat of an original cut thrown wide open…and ruffles to its sleeves. Shirt collars turned down in Byronic fashion, an elaborately embroidered waistcoat whence issued voluminous folds of frill, and shoes adorned with red rosettes – black hair pomatumed and elaborately curled, and his person redolent with perfume – announcing himself as the Homer or Dante of the age.¹⁸

In ‘pretentious tones’ he read the whole of the first canto, making dramatic gestures which presented one of those in his audience, his fellow author, Samuel Warren, with an irresistible opportunity to ridicule him. Warren did so with such accurate mimicry that the audience burst into laughter.¹⁹

Derision as much as bewilderment and disappointment greeted the work when it was published in two parts in March and June 1834. Disraeli had expected a far different response.

‘I have executed the work to my satisfaction, and, what is more, to the satisfaction of my father, a critic difficult to please,’ he told Benjamin Austen. ‘I await the result with composure, although I am not sanguine of pleasing the million. I feel that I have now done enough for my reputation and that I am at length justified in merely looking to my purse.’²⁰

Concealing as best he could the disappointment he felt at the reception of the heroic verses of the Revolutionary Epick – the dedication of which the Duke of Wellington had been offered and had declined, on the grounds that he never did accept such offers because of the necessity of perusing every work presented to him for this purpose²¹ – Disraeli once more became an unmistakable sight in London drawing-rooms in the season of 1834.

Back in London in May, he dined with the widowed Lady Blessington. ‘Also there were Lords Castlereagh, Elphinstone and Allen…Lord Wilton was the absent guest, having to dine with the King, but he came in the evening.’ ‘Hope’s ball on Monday was the finest thing in the year,’ he continued his account, ‘supped off gold and danced in the sculpture gallery. Today is the Drawing-room…I dine with O’Connell on Saturday…I was at Lady Dudley Stuart’s on Sunday – a pleasant circle – and made the acquaintance of Lord Hertford [Lord Monmouth in Disraeli’s Coningsby and Lord Steyne in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair]. I dine with Lady Cork today to meet the Mulgraves, Tavistocks and Lincolns…I made [William] Beckford’s acquaintance at the opera on Thursday. Conversation of three hours…I dined [again] yesterday with Lady Blessington and Durham [the Lord Privy Seal in Earl Grey’s cabinet] and he talked to me nearly the whole evening; and afterwards at Lady Salisbury’s.’

An American journalist, N.P. Willis, known as ‘Namby Pamby’ Willis, was among the guests at Lady Blessington’s and described in the New York Mirror how Count D’Orsay, ‘in splendid defiance of others’ dullness’, sparkled throughout the first half-hour of dinner which would otherwise ‘have passed off with the usual English fashion of earnest silence…Bulwer and Disraeli were silent altogether.’

He would have ‘foreboded a dull dinner,’ this guest continued, had he not ‘read the promise of change in the expression’ of the ‘open brow, clear sunny eye and unembarrassed repose of the beautiful and expressive mouth of Lady Blessington’. The change ‘came presently’.

She gathered up the cobweb threads of conversation going on at different parts of the table and…flung them into Disraeli’s fingers. It was an appeal to his opinion on a subject he well understood, and he burst at once, without preface, into that fiery vein of eloquence which, hearing many times after, and always with new delight, has stamped Disraeli in my mind as the most wonderful talker I have ever had the fortune to meet. He is anything but a declaimer. You would never think him on stilts. If he catches himself in a rhetorical sentence, he mocks at it in the next breath. He is satirical, contemptuous, pathetic, humorous, everything in a moment. Add to this that Disraeli’s is the most intellectual face in England – pale, regular, and overshadowed with the most luxuriant masses of raven-black hair – and you will scarce wonder that meeting him for the first time Lord Durham was impressed…Without meaning any disrespect to Disraeli, whom I admire as much as any man in England, I remarked to my neighbour, a celebrated artist, that it would make a glorious drawing of Satan tempting an archangel to rebel.²²

‘I have had great success in society this year in every respect,’ Disraeli told his sister with accustomed self-congratulation in June 1834.

I make my way easily in the highest set…I am also right in politics as well as society, being now backed by a very powerful party, and I think the winning one…I was at the Duchess of St Albans on Monday, but rather too late for the fun. It was a most brilliant fête. The breakfast a real banquet but I missed the Morris dancers…In the evening at Lady Essex where the coterie consisted of the new Postmaster-General and his lady, the Chesterfields, the George Ansons, the Albert Conynghams and Castlereagh. Tuesday after the Opera I supped with Castlereagh who gave a very recherché party…Tonight after paying my respects to their Majestys [King William IV and Queen Adelaide] at the Opera, I am going to the Duchess of Hamilton’s…Yesterday Lord Durham called upon me…A good story [told him by Lady Cork]:

Lady Cork: Do you know young Disraeli?

Lord Carrington: Hem! Why? Eh?

Lady Cork: Why, he is your neighbour, isn’t he, eh?

Lord Carrington: His father is.

Lady Cork: I know that. His father is one of my dearest friends. I dote on the Disraelis.

Lord Carrington: This young man is a very extraordinary sort of person. The father I like; he is very quiet and respectable.

Lady C.: Why do you think the young man extraordinary? I should not think that you could taste him.

Lord C.: He is a great agitator. Not that he troubles us much now. He is never amongst us now. I believe he has gone abroad again.

Lady C., literatim: You old fool! Why, he sent me this book this morning. You need not look at it; you can’t understand it. It is the finest book ever written. Gone abroad, indeed! Why, he is the best ton in London! There is not a party that goes down without him. The Duchess of Hamilton says there is nothing like him. Lady Lonsdale would give her head and shoulders for him. He would not dine at your house if you were to ask him. He does not care for people because they are lords; he must have fashion, or beauty, or wit, or something: and you are a very good sort of person, but you are nothing more.

The old Lord took it very good-humouredly, and laughed. Lady Cork has read every line of the new book. I don’t doubt the sincerity of her admiration, for she has laid out 17s. in crimson velvet, and her maid is binding it…²³

Soon after this letter was written Disraeli joined ‘a water party…almost the only party of pleasure that ever turned out to be pleasant…The day was beautiful…We sailed up to Greenwich…We had a magnificent banquet on deck, and had nothing from shore except whitebait piping hot…I never knew a more agreeable day, and never drank so much champagne in my life.’

A few weeks later Disraeli was back at Bradenham and soon picked up his pen to continue the notes which he did not choose to describe as a diary: ‘What a vast number of extraordinary characters have passed before me or with whom I have become acquainted. Interviews with O’Connell, Beckford and Lord Durham…I have become very popular with the dandies. D’Orsay took a fancy to me, and they take their tone from him. Lady Blessington is their muse and she declared violently in my favour…I am as popular with first-rate men as I am hated by the second-rate.’²⁴ He could scarcely include the Duke of Wellington among the first-rate men with whom he was popular, but he did meet him, so he said, at Lady Cork’s ‘wearing his blue ribbon [as a Knight of the Order of Garter] on the eve of the day Lord Grey resigned [8 July 1834]. “He always wears his blue ribbon when mischief is going on,” whispered Ossulston to me.’

As for enemies in his account of second-rate men, Disraeli mentions only one – Samuel Rogers: ‘Considering his age I endeavour to conciliate him, but it is impossible. I think I will give him cause to hate me.’²⁵

Among the first-rate men with whom he was popular, he did not mention Bulwer, whose place in his affection had been taken by D’Orsay, who, so he told Lady Blessington, would be very welcome if he cared to come down to Bradenham for a few days. ‘I suppose it is vain to hope to see my dear D’Orsay here,’ he wrote to her. ‘I wish indeed he would come. Here is a cook by no means contemptible. He can bring his horses if he likes, but I can mount him. Adieu, Lady Blessington, some day I will try to write you a more amusing letter; at present I am in truth ill and sad.’

Later that year he told Benjamin Austen that, for ‘exactly two months’, since 24 August, he had been suffering from a ‘strange illness’ that kept him to his sofa – ‘great pain in the legs and extraordinary languor’.

‘It came upon me suddenly,’ he reported. ‘I struggled against it for some time, but mounting my horse one day, I had a slight determination of blood to my head and was obliged to throw myself to the ground. This frightened me, remembering old sufferings, and I laid up. Quiet, diet and plenteous doses of ammonia (heavenly maid) not only restored me, but I felt better and more hearty this last fortnight than I long remember.’²⁶