Disraeli: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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

       8 AFFAIRS

      ‘I may commit many follies in life, but I never intend to marry for “love”.’

      

      EARLIER THAT YEAR, IN FEBRUARY 1834, while staying at The Grange, Southend, Disraeli had made one of his rare excursions into the hunting field.

      ‘I hunted the other day with Sir Henry Smythe’s hounds,’ he told his sister with characteristic and not altogether mocking self-congratulation, ‘and although not in scarlet was the best mounted man in the field…I stopped at nothing. I gained great kudos, having nearly killed an Arabian mare in a run of 30 miles.’^*1