DISRAELI'S WIFE

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 15 January 1927, Page 11

DISRAELI'S WIFE

STORY OF A RICH WIDOW

SORDID UNION ENDS IN ROMANCE

¥f 'T HEN the cynic asserted that widows \H are always rich, what precisely did yj he mean? Was it that they were believed to be rich, or let it be thought- that they were, or that the man who married one of them was after money, or that, the public said he was after her for her money? The popular .judgment on widows is very severe, even widows’ weeds being interpreted as merely another way of advertising for a new husband! A hardened worldling declared that the rich widow cries with one eye and laughs with the other. Addison thought widows the most perverse people in the world, but the elder Weller was more trenchant than all the critics: “Take example by your father, my boy, be very careful o’ vidders all your life.” When a widow has inherited some wealth, she is sure to be heard of. One of the most outstanding instances in last century was that of Mrs Wyndham .Lewis, who married Benjamin Disraeli in 1839. Her first husband had been one of the members of Parliament for Maidstone, and Disraeli was the other. According to Disraeli, she was a pretty little woman, a rattle, a flirt, and very voluble. She was a dozen years older than Disraeli, and an acquaintance had the wretched taste to say to him, “What feeling can you possibly have for that old woman?” Instead of knocking the fellow clown, Disraeli quietly replied: “One that is foreign to your nature, and which you could not understand—gratitude.” What he meant was that she had brought him a fine house in Park Lane, and about £SOOO a year. To a politician with endless ambition, and sure of his ability, this was of great importance. He himself confessed that when he first made his advances he was prompted by no romantic feelings, yet his letters to her tell quite another tale. The day after she had left London on a visit he wrote to her, “All is dull, silent, spiritless; the charm is broken, the magic is fled!” Love even drove him to poetry, not an unusual experience, but in Disraeli’s case he went on to the composition of a great tragedy. “I wrote your name in large characters and placed it before me. T remembered

your parting injunctions. 1 poured all my spirit into my tragedy. There is no hell on earth like separated love.”

But the course of true love never did run smooth. He was eager and impulsive; she was colder, and had reached the period at which feeling waits upon judgment. She persisted in having no open engagement till the conventional year had passed, and the biographer thinks she was not unmindful of those elusive feminine arts by which a lover is at once baffled and fascinated. Among her letters found after her death there is one which tells the story of their first and last serious quarrel. He says he was humiliated and distressed, and desired to quit her house for ever. He tells her the naked truth. He had thought her amiable, tender yet acute, and gifted with no ordinary mind, one who would share his triumph and happiness. “Now for your fortune; 1 write the sheer truth. That proved to be much less than lor the woifld imagined.” He could not eat and sleep in that house without feeling himself a penniless adventurer. Her allowance could not benefit him, and he would not condescend to be the minion of a princess. His nature demanded that his life should be perpetual love. He closed his letter with an histrionic farewell.

Of course the quarrel was made up. She wrote him for God’s sake to come to her, for she was ill. and distracted. In later days she used to say: “ Dizzy’ married me for my money, but if he had the chance again he would marry me for love. ’ ’ In a curious document she analyses her husband’s character and her own under seventeen headings. She describes him as never irritable, and herself ms very irritable; he is very calm, while she is effervescent; he is a genius and she is a dunce. Her friends thought her vain and shallow, irresponsible and tactless, bizarre and unconventional to a degree that often embarrassed her circle. Yet she had„rare intuition and judgment, and her husband confessed that she was the most cheerful and the most courageous woman he ever-knew. Their married life was Tull of happiness. She was a perfect wife and a perfect companion.