DISRAELI’S FAVOURITE NOVEL
This splendidly lurid cover is from a cheap 1888 paperback reissue of Disraeli’s 1832 novel and is one, I suspect, to which the author might not have objected, for his hero is a well-born romantic hero whose dramatic encounters with beautiful women occur at intervals throughout the book.
‘I have ever lived in, as it were, two worlds, a public world and a private world.’ Thus muses the young Contarini Fleming, echoing the view of his creator, for Disraeli maintained at least two very different identities as author and Prime Minister. In the private world, says Contarini, he is ‘ever most happy’ but in the public world he is miserable. The book Contarini Fleming was Disraeli’s favourite of his own novels and the one he felt most reflected his beliefs and attitudes. That seems an extraordinary admission to make, for the young hero – very young; he is but a boy when he sets out on his adventures – is explosive and unreasonable, given to violent outbursts, absurd conceit, and impossible devotions to unattainable women. He is, he feels, the true poetic heir to the noble Contarinis of ancient Venice, and from a young age is convinced that his poet’s soul, once it has been recognised by the fools with which the world is populated, will lead him inexorably on to literary fame and glory.
‘When I can first recall existence, I remember myself a melancholy child.’
He has been named Contarini after his mother, who died in giving birth to him and who was indeed a Contarini, but his father is Baron Fleming, a Saxon nobleman, who before long moves away from Venice and marries again. Children seldom take kindly to the replacement of one mother by another and, although his stepmother does her best, the boy remains hostile to her. Nor does he take to his two half-brothers. ‘I viewed them with passive antipathy.’ Neither does he take to Saxony: ‘Wherever I moved, I looked around me, and beheld a race different from myself. There was no sympathy between my frame, and the rigid climate whither I had been brought to live.’
These are the views of both the author and his subject for, although this is not an autobiographical story, it mirrors Disraeli’s own wavering identity. He was a baptised Anglican with a Jewish heritage his opponents never let him forget, a man at the heart of things but never quite a part of them, and his self-made path from literary stardom to political power was adorned with several spectacular romantic episodes.
Disraeli’s prose is perfectly readable today, even if one has to skip over the frequent passages of flowery rhetoric. Young Contarini is a young dreamer trailing behind Goethe’s Young Werthe and the questing wanderer in Wilhelm Meister. His wild and intolerable self-belief would have seemed less intolerable to readers at the time, for he echoes those Goethian and Byronic romantic heroes who influenced countless writers throughout the nineteenth century and who continued to stride across the pages of writers such as Thomas Carlyle, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev and, decades later, Friedrich Nietzsche. Here, Benjamin Disraeli lays out his own version of that creed:
‘We are the slaves of false knowledge. Our memories are filled with ideas, that have no origin in Truth. We learn nothing from ourselves. The sum of our experience is but a dim dream of the conduct of past generations, generations that lived in a total ignorance of their nature. Our instructors are the unknowing and the dead. We study human nature in a charnel-house, and, like the nations of the East, we pay Divine honours to the maniac and the fool. A series of systems have mystified existence. We believe what our fathers credited, because they were convinced without a cause. The faculty of Thought has been destroyed. Yet our emasculated minds, without the power of fruition, still pant for the charms of wisdom. It is this that makes us fly with rapture to False Knowledge—to Tradition, to Prejudice, to Custom, Delusive Tradition, destructive Prejudice, degenerating Custom! It is this that makes us prostrate ourselves with reverence before the wisdom of by-gone Ages, in no one of which has man been the master of his own reason.
‘I am desirous of writing a book which shall be all truth, a work of which the passion, the thought, the action, and even the style, should spring from my own experience of feeling, from the meditations of my own intellect, from my own observation of incident, from my own study of the genius of expression.’
For the years covered by the story, Contarini’s path is Byronic, as the impetuous young hero carries his innocence and passion through a series of impossibly romantic adventures (and adventurous romances) on his quest for literary success. He does not find writing quite as easy as he had supposed. Many a writer will sympathise with him when the lad confesses:
‘My mind seemed full to the very brink, but not a drop of the rich stream overflowed. I became anxious, nervous, fretful. I walked about: I reseated myself. Again I threw down the pencil. I was like a man disenchanted. I could scarcely recall the visions of yesterday, and if, with an effort, I succeeded, they appeared cold, tame, dull, lifeless. Nothing can describe my blank despair.
‘They know not, they cannot tell—the cold, dull world—they cannot even remotely conceive the agony of doubt and despair, which is the doom of youthful genius. To sigh for Fame in obscurity,
is like sighing in a dungeon for light. Yet the votary and the captive share an equal hope. But to feel the strong necessity of fame, and to be conscious without intellectual excellence life must be insupportable, to feel all this with no simultaneous faith in your own power—these are moments of despondency for which no immortality can compensate.’
Contarini gains wisdom (of sorts) partly through experience and partly from the advice and guidance of his mentor, a wanderer like himself but older, whom he meets in the woods after he (Contarini) has, in a somewhat eye-opening scene, been seduced by a pair of gypsy lovelies and then robbed by their male companion. The mentor, Winter, reappears throughout the book with pearls of wisdom such as the following which he inscribes in a book he leaves with the guileless boy: ‘Be patient. Cherish hope. Read more. Ponder less. Nature is more powerful than education.’
In a preface added to the work a year after publication Disraeli says of the book, ‘But the truth is, a wandering existence was a necessary epoch in the career of the hero’ and indeed he gives as the chief subject of his book ‘the development and formation of the poetic character’. The irony, which can hardly have been lost on Disraeli, is that ultimately his impetuous young hero does not find literary success but instead gains property, respectability and a modicum of political power. Here again we see the author writing himself onto the page, for Disraeli became best known in his lifetime (and is now remembered) as a successful politician who also wrote some books.
As we grow older we all wonder from time to time what would have happened if, at some point earlier in life, we had chosen differently and taken another path. Disraeli managed the near-impossible feat of staying on two paths for years until he finally forsook art for politics. Often he must have wondered if had chosen wisely. As Contarini’s mentor says to console the failed young poet:
‘Action is now your part. Meditation is culture. It is well to think until a man have [sic] discovered his genius, and developed his faculties, but then let him put his Intelligence in motion. Act, act, act; act without ceasing, and you will no longer talk of the vanity of life.’
‘But how am I act?’
‘Create. Man is made to create, from the Poet to the Potter.’
Disraeli may have felt his supreme achievement, viewed perhaps with the same resignation as that of the older Contarini when he looked back on his life, was to have created himself.
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