DISRAELI'S LOVE STORY.

Otago Witness, Issue 3467, 24 August 1920, Page 51

DISRAELI'S LOVE STORY.

His Letters to Lady Chesterfield and Lady Bradford Beat' Anything that Meredith Could Have Conceived in Amorous Psychology. t "Disraeli was a mystery man at every Btage in his career, and always a finished actor. Hence the perennial interest which he inspires. We may presume to think that we understand a Pitt or a Peel or a Gladstone, but who understands Disraeli?" asks the Daily Telegraph. "Mr" Buckle's new biography reveals to the world an extraordinary love episode of the closing stage of his career which had been kept a well-guarded secret. It will come as a great surprise, for Disraeli's devotion to his wife —she died in 1873—was profound. He described her death as the supreme sorrow of his life. To Two Sisters. — " 'I cannot, in any degree,' he wrote, 'subdue the anguish of my heart.' And yet, only a few months afterwards, he was Writing reams of love-letters to two sisters, both of whom were grandmothers and the elder two years older than himself. The Countess of Chesterfield was a widow; the Countess of Bradford was married. Disraeli, who was really in love with the younger ladv, proposed to marry the elder, in order that he might secure both wife and sister at the same time, and her refusal imposed no check on his fluent pen. They were not ordinary letters; Disraeli never fell into commonplace. " 'To see you, or at least to hear from you every day,' he wrote to Lady Bradford, 'is absolutely necessary to my existence.' T have lived,' he wrote in another letter, 'to know the twilight of love, its splendour and richness.' And again: 'lt is not a slice of the moon that I want; it is all.' He named his last novel 'Eaidymion.' The clue to the choice of that title lies evidently -in Lady Bradford's name, Selina, which is taken from the Greek word for the moon. •■ —.Penned on the Treasury Bench. — "Mr Buckle tells us that these letters were often penned on the Treasury Bench or in Cabinet—Disraeli was Prime Minister at the time—-and many of them were written on the black-edged notepaper which bore witness to his recent loss of his wife. Eleven hundred of these letters to Lady Bradford are in existence, covering the period when he was at the height of his power in politics and when he had reached the goal of his ambition, and it is no wonder that Lady Bradford was seriously embarrassed by these ardours of the post and special messenger, though Disraeli defended himself from her reproaches by saying that he never asked anything from her but her society. 'When 1 have that, I am content, which I may well be, for its delight is ineffable.' The Lonely Premier.— "Years before he had written in 'Lothair' that 'Three-score years and ter at the present day is the period of romantic passion,' little thinking that he was to illustrate this in his own lif« Yet all the time we are assured that he was faithful to the memory of his wife, his deep affection for whom was founded, as he once said, on 'gratitude.' She had been to him a perfect companion, and he always craved for the understanding companionship of a woman. "He was one of those who need an Egeria. 'I require,' he wrote, in a wonderful letter to Lady Bradford, 'perfect solitude or perfect sympathy. My present life gives me neither of these ineffable blessings. It may be brilliant, but it is too fragmentary. It is not a complete existence. It gives me neither the highest development of the intellect nor the heart; neither Poetry nor Love.' However much Disraeli** was immersed in affairs of State and party struggle, his heart was lonely, and he sought solace in the outpourings of platonic affection, couched in much the same terms that he might have employed in the ardours of youth. Age had not robbed him of his imagination, but he himself had written long before: 'Manhood is a struggle; old age a regret.' " Disraeli Self -Boswellised.— "With the revelation of the private letters to Lady Bradford and her sister, as well as the extraordinary correspondence with the Queen, we have nothing less than Disraeli self-Boswellised," says the Observer. "And not only that. You have added as between a septuagenarian and a grandmother, a love affair which was a thing of fantasy, a pas de fascination of the mind, yet so perfervid in its platonism, so passionate and intense in its' physic agonies and raptures, that Stendhal might turn in his grave not to have known about it that he might add a special chapter to his erotic breviary 'De I'Amour,' while Balzac would have seen in it the spiritual and pathetic complement of certain belated themes pursued in 'Cousine Bette.' "But, of course, a closer analogy may be found nearer home. One had never thought to find in any mortal book something of the interest of Hazlitt's 'Liber * Amoris' combined with the interest of Boswell. Behind the impassive mask Disraeli had the inextinguishable emotions. These two things together explain the controlled agitation which is part of the magic of his style at its best. The light thrown upon his inmost personality and on the human heart in general surpasses in these two last volumes for purposes of literary remembrance all that the whole biography has to say about historic politics or party manoeuvres and measures. "The unexpected thing is to find him at once his own Boswell and giving us a pew 'Liber Amoris' after his wife's death. It is a very strange story. For imaginative yet poignant ecstacies and sufferings at an advanced age it is a very strange Etoxy. Of its kind we know none more Btrange.'' His Mary Anne.— "Mrs Disraeli comes out very well,"

says the Observer. "In spite of her eccentricities and crudities and homely contrast with the brilliant genius she married and sustained, she was an adoring and ministering wife, more universally liked than laughed at. She lived only for him. She carries it so far that in a most touching little letter she begs him if she dies not" to live alone. In return he treats her to the end of her days with a most devoted and flattering chivalry. We cannot say less of this—and could not say better of" anything—than that it is a most creditable episode in the queer relations of men and women." "

There is a curious reference to his wife in a letter written to Montagu Corry: "She does not appear to have destroyed a single scrap I ever wrote to her, before or after marriage, and never to have cut my hair, which she did every two or three weeks for 33 years, without garnering the harvest; so, as you once asked for some of an early date, I send you a packet, of which I could not break the seal." —My Own Dear Husband. —■ At her death she left Disraeli a touching letter: "June 6, 1856. "My Own Dear Husband,—lf I should depart this life before you, leave orders that we may be buried in the same grave at whatever distance you may die from England. And now, God bless you, my kindest, dearest! You have been-a perfect husband to me. Be put by my side in the same grave. And now, farewell, my dear Dizzy. Do not live alone, dearest. Some one I earnestly hope you may find as attached to you as your own devoted Mary Anne." She was 80 and He was 68. — "His Mary Anne was twelve years older than himself," says the Observer. "When she died she was 80 and he was 68. The loneliness of spirit was intolerable. The human imagination could not support a vacancy. It must have an object. Within a year -he is violently in love. Lady Chesterfield is only less dear than the dearest, though both ladies—and otherwise the episode would be unintelligible—were mingled with the brightest memories of his youth, 40 years before. And to his enviable imagination could give his sunset the illusions of the dawn.

When he (68) proposed to Lady Chesterfield (70) she refused him for more than one reason, but chiefly because he loved her married sister (53) best and did not disguise it. Had she accepted him she would certainly have become his chief confidant, for it was his nature to make most of his wife because she was his wife.

"We and posterity are fortunate that she declined. Could either lady have been always with him, we could not have had the correspondence, springing from frequent separation. So he turns to Lady Bradford as the 'idole immortelle,' though she is a mature Victorian matron, obviously sensitive even to the appearance of the excessive or absurd, and wife of an excellent peer whom he made Master of the Horse in his own Administration. "To 'Lady Ches.'he Avrites hundreds of letters in the last eight years of hi 3 life, to Lady Bradford over a thousand. To the latter he sometimes writes two and three times a day from his own house, from the Treasury Bench, from wherever he is staying. ".Some of those who were in the inner circle of affairs soon realised that Lady Bradford knew everything. What would Queen Victoria have thought had she suspected that one of Beacons'field's letters felicitates Lady Bradford on knowing more political secrets than the Quesn herself? His Letters.— "He pours forth rhapsodies and lamentations. He tells of his horrible loneliness and desolation without her. He tells her that 'there is no greater misfortune than to have a heart that can never grow old.' More and more he becomes a physical ruin of a man carrying on his public life in extremist ruin through pain, pre-occu-pied with aches and maladies, with pills and medicines and carefulness in diet, yet in his physical decrepitude he is full of moonlight and nightingales. His youth, its emotions, visions, lives in him inextinguishably. "Memorably he says : 'I live for Power and the Affections.' Nothing more genuine and significant nor more attractive in its sort was ever said by any famous man about himself. In the most notable of all the eleven hundred letters he has a passage steeped in pensive and melancholy charm, when he says in effect that however splendid his life may seem to the world it is dreary and broken to himself, for he is more or less deprived of the two things necessary to its harmony and therefore to its happiness—Poetry and Love. Hardly a Dead Word.—

"In all this writing there is hardly a dead word. There is scarce one scrap of it all but contains some vivid and arresting touch of his continual commentary on life. For the rest we perceive that Don Quixote and Dulcinea are but the exaggeration of an eternal theme. He sees in Lady Bradford not only the real woman, but all the most romantic that can be supposed of any woman. 'What more is required to win him the sympathies of all women?

"It is to be hoped that Lady Bradford knew what she was getting," adds the Observer. "We cannot quite tell. The letters from both sisters were destroyed bv request. In the first years at least she was uneasy and embarrassed. His conspicuous attentions made her uncomfortable. She rebukes him, and he is dejected, but it is so like him that he continues until rebuke ceases. At the crown and height of things after the Berlin Congress it could not be but that Lady Bradford was a proud woman. But very evidently fhe could not quite understand him. For that she would either have had to be a woman of genius or a Mary Anne." Disraeli's Letters.—

Here are some quotations from these fascinating letters : "Lady Bradford was obviously rather seared by excessive ardour, and we find

him writing to protest against her taking offence:

" 'I do not think I was very -unreasonable. I have never asked anything from you but your society. When I have that, I am content, which I may well be, for its delight is ineffable. When we were separated, the loneliness of my life found some relief in what might have been a too fond idolatry.' " 'The menace of perpetual estrangement seemed a severe punishment for what might have been a weakness, but scarcely an unpardonable one. However, you shall have no cause to inflict it.' "

Mr Buckle remarks on the fact that Disraeli was much more copious of endearing epithets to the sister he did not love than to the sister he did:

"The letters to Lady Bradford generally start without any preparatory endearments ; but Lady Chesterfield was 'dearest, dearest Ladv Ches.,' 'dearest of women,' 'charming playfellow/ and finally, in most of the letters after the first year or two, 'dear darling' ; and we find such expressions as 'whatever happens to me in the world I shall always love you'; and after an attack of gout at Bretby, 'Adieu, dear and darling friend, I have no language to express to you my entire affection.' " 'To love as I love and rarely to see the being one adores, whose constant society is absolutely necessary to my life; to be precluded even from the only shadowy compensation for such a torturing doom—the privilege of relieving my heart. by expressing its affection —is a lot which I never could endure and cannot. But for my strange position, which enslaves while it elevates me, I would fly for ever, as I often contemplate, to some beautiful solitude and relieve in ideal creation the burthen of such a dark and harassing existence. But the iron laws of a stern necessity seem to control our lives, and with all the daring and all the imagination in the world, conscious or unconscious, we are slaves. . . ."