Disraeli: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ as the perfection of English prose,’ he wrote with characteristic immodesty, ‘and a chef d’ouvre [sic].’ But the sales of the book remained sluggish; and the author and publisher received no more than £36 between them.⁴

      ‘Don’t be nervous about the sale, that’s nothing,’ Tom Campbell tried to comfort Disraeli. ‘This will last. It’s a philosophical work, Sir.’

      Disheartened by the poor sales of Contarini Fleming, Murray returned the manuscript of Disraeli’s next book, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, when it was offered to him the following year. Published instead by Henry Colburn, it was even less successful than its predecessor; and, while its author had had ‘no doubt of its success’, it aroused derision rather than the ‘golden opinions’ which, so he told Sarah, he was expecting.

      ‘Oh reader, dear! Do pray look here,’ one critic wrote in a parody of its style, ‘and you will spy the curly hair and forehead fair, and nose so high and gleaming eye of Benjamin Dis-ra-e-li, the wondrous boy who wrote Alroy in rhyme and prose, only to show, how long ago, victorious Judah’s lion-banner rose.’^*5

      Having withdrawn his name from the books of Lincoln’s Inn, Disraeli now began seriously to consider the political career which he had been vaguely contemplating for some time past. While abroad, he had become an assiduous reader of that ‘excellent publication’, Galignani’s Messenger, and on his return he declared that, ‘in the event of a new election’, he intended to offer himself as a parliamentary candidate for High Wycombe, the constituency in which Bradenham was situated. In the meantime, with Edward Lytton Bulwer’s help, he determined to make himself better known in London society.

      In letters to Sarah he charted his success in this respect. At Bulwer’s house in Hertford Street, so he told her, he met Lord Strangford and Lord Mulgrave, later Marquess of Normanby, with whom he also had ‘a great deal of conversation’, and Lord Eliot, later Earl of St Germans, who invited him to a male dinner party where he sat next to John Charles Herries, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, ‘old, grey-haired, financial’, who turned out to be ‘quite a literary man – so false are one’s impressions’.

      At one ‘very brilliant party’ at Bulwer’s he met Charles Pelham Villiers, the Earl of Clarendon’s younger brother, Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton, as well as Colonel Webster, ‘who married Bodding-ton’s daughter’, a man who ‘talked to [him] very much’ and ‘turned out to be Lord William Lennox’, ‘Colonel and Captain A’Court, brothers of Lord Heytesbury’, and Captain Yorke, later fourth Earl of Hardwicke.

      Disraeli’s provenance was not such as to gain him entry yet into the greatest houses, but less particular hostesses, encouraged by Bulwer, welcomed his company and enjoyed his sprightly, witty, fertile conversation. He was entertained by Lady Cork, Lady Dudley Stuart and Lady Charleville; he became a regular guest at Lady Blessington’s house, and a close friend of Lady Blessington’s lover, the attractive, egotistical, inordinately extravagant Count D’Orsay, the husband of her stepdaughter and the acknowledged arbiter of dandiacal fashion.

      At Lady Blessington’s Disraeli was introduced to Lord Durham; at the opera he met William Beckford; at Lord Eliot’s he sat next to the awkward and reserved Sir Robert Peel, the former Home Secretary and future Prime Minister, who – so he confidently assured his sister in letters which boasted outrageously of his social success – was ‘most gracious’. ‘He is a very great man, indeed,’ he told Sarah, ‘and they all seem afraid of him. By-the-bye, I observed that he attacked his turbot most entirely with his knife…I can easily conceive that he could be very disagreeable, but yesterday [at Eliot’s] he was in a most condescending mood and unbent with becoming haughtiness. I reminded him by my dignified familiarity both that he was an ex-Minister and I apresent Radical.’⁶

      Disraeli’s reception by Peel seems, however, not to have been so obliging as he claimed. ‘Probably from nervousness, Disraeli did not recommend himself to Sir Robert Peel,’ according to Lord St Germans. He asked him to lend him some papers. But ‘Peel buried his face in his neckcloth and did not speak a word to Disraeli during the rest of the meal…From his appearance or manner Sir Robert Peel seemed to take an intuitive dislike to him.’⁷

      Peel was far from being the only person whom Disraeli offended. He himself continued to assure his sister that he was the greatest social success both in London and in the country. Certainly, there were those who were overwhelmed by his brilliance. Yet there were many others who were exasperated by him; by his habit of pontificating with his thumbs tucked into the armholes of his waistcoat; by his irritating practice of prefacing his remarks with an incantation, picked up in the Near East, ‘Allah is great’; by his elaborate affectation of weary boredom on being asked to meet someone whom he had no wish to know.

      ‘The world calls me “conceited”,’ he wrote in what has become known as the ‘Mutilated Diary’ of 1833, because large sections have been excised from it. ‘The world is in error. I trace all the blunders of my life to sacrificing my own opinion to that of others.’⁸

      At Bulwer’s, as well as dandies and literati and up and coming politicians there was also ‘a large sprinkling’ of bluestockings, among them Lady Morgan, the Irish novelist, Caroline Norton, R. B. Sheridan’s granddaughter, the Whig hostess, and Letitia Landon, the poet, with whom her host was believed to be having an affair. She looked, so Disraeli said, ‘the very personification of Brompton – pink satin dress and white satin shoes, red cheeks, snub nose, and her hair a la Sappho’. At a later soirée, Disraeli met her again; but this time she ‘was perfectly à la française and really looked pretty’.⁹

      The prolific novelist and dramatist, Catherine Gore – whose Manners of the Day had been praised by King George IV as ‘the best and most amusing novel published in his remembrance’ – was also there, and so was another bluestocking who, so Bulwer said, was particularly anxious to meet him. ‘Oh! My dear fellow,’ Disraeli said, ‘I cannot really – the power of repartee has deserted me.’¹⁰ But his host insisted. ‘I have pledged myself – you must come,’ he said, and Disraeli was accordingly introduced to a very sumptuous personage looking like ‘a full rich blown rose’. ‘I never’, Disraeli commented, ‘rec’d so cordial a reception in my life.’¹¹

      On another occasion, Bulwer’s wife asked him to take a lady, considerably older than himself, into dinner. ‘Oh! Anything rather than that insufferable woman,’ he said before walking languidly towards her.

      ‘In the course of an evening at Bulwer’s,’ Disraeli told Sarah, ‘I stumbled over Tom Moore, to whom I introduced myself…“I have heard of you, as everybody has,” he said. “Did we not meet at Murray’s once?”’¹²

      He went on to talk about London’s gentlemen’s clubs, membership of which Disraeli was finding it difficult to acquire. He would have liked to join White’s which, founded at White’s Chocolate House in 1693 on the site of what is now Boodle’s, was the oldest and grandest of the St James’s gentlemen’s clubs; but its members were most unlikely to support the candidature of a prospective member of Disraeli’s background, appearance, race and manner, not to mention his authorship of Vivian Grey. Much the same objections would be raised by the members of Boodle’s, СКАЧАТЬ