Review: Disraeli's novel "Contarini Fleming" is torn between competing temperaments

When the title character in Benjamin Disraeli’s 1832 novel Contarini Fleming: A Psychological Autobiography returns home from college, his father (based in part on the author’s father, Isaac D’Israeli) listens with pleasure and amusement as Contarini shows off the results of his reading at school. The boy is newly witty and articulate, tossing off pithy observations on philosophy, history and other disciplines. “But when he found that I believed in innate ideas, he thought that my self-delusion began to grow serious,” Contarini narrates. The 27-year-old Disraeli was referencing a philosophical point of view held by Descartes and Plato, that humans are born with certain ideas innately, such as the nature of God, or moral viewpoints. This philosophical position was opposed by some of the great 18^th Century Enlightenment masters, including Locke and Voltaire, as its sort of Romantic mysticism was at odds with their empiricism. 

Scholars have often pointed out that Contarini Fleming is a portrait of the conflict between Disraeli’s temperament as a “poet” and his temperament as an aspiring statesman. That’s an interesting enough subject, as very few statesman have also been novelists. The cognitive dissonance this conflict causes in the lead character can reveal much about each temperament, because we rarely have the chance to see both in the same person. That’s fascinating in its own right. But what critics don’t appear to have pointed out about Contarini Fleming is that the book is also a portrait of the conflict in Disraeli’s thought between 18^th Century Enlightenment thinking like his father’s and 19^th Century Romantic thinking like that of the book upon which in part he modeled Contarini, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.  

Paul Smith in his 1987 essay “Disraeli’s Politics” notes that “The nature and function of romanticism in Disraeli’s thought is another subject demanding a thorough treatment.” Smith names an unpublished dissertation and other similarly unavailable sources as candidates to fill in this gap but deems them unsatisfying. Since then, in 1999, Smith and Charles Richmond published a book of essays called The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli that features an essay by Daniel Schwarz on romanticism in Disraeli’s thought, but it does little to cover the tension in the statesman’s thought between the Enlightenment and Romantic eras. More recently, in 2014, Robert O’Kell released a book, Disraeli: The Romance of Politics, whose title suggests it would seem to fit the bill, but it is not the book Smith was looking for. Neither is this review, but it strikes me that the intellectual conflict is one of the under-covered aspects of Contarini Fleming.

A key moment demonstrating this tension between 18th and 19th Century temperaments is found in the tale of Contarini's championing of the notion of innate ideas. Contarini continues detailing his father's reaction to his embrace of the Cartesians: “Affecting no want of interest in my pursuits, he said to me one day in a careless tone, ‘Contarini, I am no great friend to reading, but as you have a taste that way, if I were you, during the vacation, I would turn over Voltaire.’” Disraeli’s hero has never read Voltaire before, but he takes the suggestion and dives in to his dad’s vast collection of writings by the 18^th Century philosophe, who was one of the first international stars of writing and philosophy, was a moral leader around Europe and is perhaps best known as the author of Candide:

“I stood before the hundred volumes; I glanced with indifference upon the wondrous and witching shelf. History, poetry, philosophy, the lucid narrative, and the wild invention, and the unimpassioned truth, they were all before me ... Never shall I forget the effect this work produced on me. What I had been long seeking offered itself. This strange mix of brilliant fantasy and poignant truth, this unrivalled blending of ideal creation and worldly wisdom, it all seemed to speak to my two natures … A philosopher and a statesman, I moralized over the condition of man and the nature of government. The style enchanted me. I delivered myself up to the full abandonment of its wild and brilliant grace.”

In that contrast, between a flirtation with the philosophy of innate ideas and a new love for Voltaire, Disraeli explores his ambivalence about 18th Century and 19th Century ideals. 

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“The whole Romantic sham, Bernard! It’s what happened to the Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigor turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and false emotion. … The decline from thinking to feeling, you see.”

-        The character of Hannah Jarvis in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia

Contarini Fleming is Disraeli’s attempt to write a Bildungsroman (a coming-of-age tale) like Wilheim Meister that explicates the development of the poetic mindset, including the emotional travails that came with his attempts at writing. He wrote in a preface to Contarini that such a history of the development of the poet had not yet been written, though he acknowledged Wilheim Meister as one attempt, and said he hoped to surpass that book. Goethe had praised Disraeli’s first novel, Vivian Grey. Contarini Fleming tells the story of the childhood and young adulthood of a boy in an unnamed Scandinavian country who is torn between becoming a poet (a category into which Disraeli includes disciples of other forms of creative writing, including novels) and becoming a statesman. It is heavily autobiographical, though many of the details of setting, character and plot have been fictionalized. Disraeli thought it was his best novel, though it did not sell well and few of the critics agree. The publisher of the novel changed the subtitle from A Psychological Autobiography to A Psychological Romance, presumably hoping that would sell better and perhaps trying to liberate the author from the word “autobiography” and the baggage it comes with for a young author. But Disraeli admitted, at least in his diary, that Contarini Fleming was largely autobiographical: “My works are the embodiment of my feelings. In Vivian Grey I have portrayed my active and real ambition. In [the 1833 novel] Alroy, my ideal ambition. The P.R. [Psychological Romance] is the development of my poetic character. This trilogy is the secret history of my feelings. I shall write no more about myself.” That he kept writing about himself all the way to the end of his life is a side point for our purposes.

The word “psychological” had not yet, in 1832 when the book came out, been professionalized the way it would come to be by Sigmund Freud. The 2004 Routledge edition of this work, which is volume three in the publisher’s series The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli (and which appears not to have been reviewed anywhere), contains an excellent introduction by Richmond that points out Freud had said no man could psychoanalyze himself. However, Richmond wrote, self-analysis is “in some measure what Disraeli seems to have achieved … It is not so much a literary, as a proto-psychoanalytic, tour de force.” Contarini tells us, in a bit of proto-Freudian analysis, that his emotional ills come as the result of a lack of maternal love. His mother was killed in childbirth, and the stepmother who replaced her presented a comparative lack of love. Critics have compared Contarini's stepmother to Disraeli’s own biological mother, who did not die in childbirth but about whom he had strangely little to say in the decades of writings he produced. As seminal Disraeli biographer Robert Blake wrote in 1966, “It is clear that he did not get on well with his mother …  Precisely what went wrong with their relationship no one now can tell. But something went wrong. There is no record of his ever talking about her after her death, and no reference to her in the numerous autobiographical fragments which survive among his papers. Indeed, one might almost think that he wished to obliterate her memory.”

As did the narrator in his prior novel, The Young Duke, Disraeli describes symptoms of a mental illness in detail in Contarini Fleming. The anonymous narrator in The Young Duke (1831) depicted himself writing in a room with statues and paintings that seemed to speak to him as he wrote, reinforcing his candidly depicted despair at the quality of the writing of that book. This time, the book was written under the influence of a depressive episode. As Richmond writes, “In part four of Contarini, Disraeli describes somatic manifestations of his illness, the existence of which are supported by external evidence in his letters at the time. It does not seem that he understood their connection to his depression. Contarini feels languid, indolent, faint, experiences loss of appetite and broken sleep, together with a ‘mysterious imbecility’ or lack of mental energy – all accompaniments of depression. He also suffers from hyperesthesias (hypersensitivity), depersonalization, auditory disturbances and fainting.” Contarini revels in these symptoms, however, suspecting as Romantic-era writers often did, that such problems accompany genius. Tom Stoppard eloquently described this point of view in the stinging passage that serves as the epigraph in this section of this blog post, from his character Hannah Jarvis, who tells her colleague Bernard that this idea of tortured genius is what became of Enlightenment rationalism: “A mind in chaos suspected of genius … The decline from thinking to feeling.”

Thus, we have the picture of Contarini as enamored of the rationalist Voltaire but besotten by Romantic emotion. The story develops that picture in the pages that follow his discovery of Voltaire. Contarini returns to his college (what would be a boarding high school in contemporary America) and forms a sort of Voltaire fan club. In these scenes Disraeli combines his idolization of Voltaire with his typical satire of the Whiggish, progressive point of view the Frenchman’s philosophy helped to encourage in England. Voltaire advocated for civil liberties, constitutional monarchy, and the values embodied in England as opposed to France. His enlightened perspective helped influence the values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity that led to the French Revolution after his death in 1778. In fact, in the depiction of his Voltaire club, Disraeli seems to sardonically satirize the Voltaire’s impact on the French Revolution. Like his father before him, who loved Voltaire but wrote a Voltairean anti-Jacobin novel lamenting the influence of French ideas in England, Disraeli was a Tory who had little love of revolutionary fervor. Contarini’s Voltaire club begins to take on a tint of anti-authority sentiment, and when the principal of the school attempts to shut it down, they flee the college and become bandits, taking up residence in an abandoned castle and robbing passing travelers at gunpoint. 

The thematic implications of having a Voltaire club degenerate into lawlessness have not been explored by any of the many critics I’ve seen write about Contarini Fleming, even though critics have been writing about the book for nearly 200 years. But it seems logical to surmise that Disraeli was lampooning Voltaire’s anti-authority side. The Englishman’s political philosophy had much to do with the enshrining of the monarchy as an unassailable sovereign, and he often sympathized with authoritarians in his youth. Two of the few writers to mention the bandit episode are Richmond, who points out the influence of Gothic literature on the section of the book that tells the story of the band of bandits, and Philip Guedalla, who wrote the introduction to a 1926 edition of the book and who simply describes the episode as “operatic." In fact the only commenter I could find who saw the episode my way (that the episode had thematic ramifications) was, strangely enough, ChatGPT. The AI chatbot seemed to leap almost manically at the topic of the “innate ideas” passage, suggesting “that little episode in Contarini – ‘innate ideas’ vs. Voltaire – is a seed” of Disraeli’s “entire” 1840s political trilogy of Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred, which was written while he was a Minister of Parliament and are now his best-remembered novels. I asked the bot where it got this notion, and ChatGPT supplied several primary sources (the novels themselves) and secondary sources that, as near as I could tell, did not in fact make this argument. ChatGPT suggested Coningsby “politicizes” the opposition between the semi-mystical notion of innate ideas and Locke's "tabula rasa" point of view, pitting what the bot called the “Voltairean Whigs” and their “old Enlightenment skepticism, Benthamite rationalism” and “aristocratic cynicism” (“the debris of the 18^th Century, sterile and without creative power”), against “innate ideas/imagination,” as “represented by Coningsby” and his generation. “Instead of metaphysics, they ground innate ideas in history and faith,” the chatbot gushed. Then it drew the parallel through its social implications in Sybil (“Voltairean skepticism” and utilitarian logic cannot solve the divide between the rich and the poor) to its literal revelation in Tancred (“Voltairean rationalism is presented as barren; Western modernity is spiritually exhausted”).

Whatever the merits or demerits of this theory, ChatGPT appears to be on to something: it is dancing around the evolution of Disraeli’s tension between his father’s Enlightenment views and his own Romanticism. By 1833 Disraeli had written more specifically of this conflict, in his poem “The Revolutionary Epick,” in which he pits an icon of “feudalism” against an icon of “federalism,” to enact a conflict about which he was then ambivalent. In a letter in 1833, quoted in Smith’s biography of Disraeli, the future prime minister described the poem: “All great works that have formed an epoch in the history of the human intellect have been an embodification of the spirit of their age... Since the revolt of America a new principle has been at work in the world to which I trace all that occurs. This is the Revolutionary principle, and this is what I wish to embody in ‘The Revolutionary Epic.’” He aligned the feudal principle with what in a separate essay he called “the aristocratic principle,” and the revolutionary or “federalist” principle with what he called the “democratic principle.” That essay, titled “What Is He?,” attempted to explain his complicated radical/conservative perspective in the days when he was running as an “independent Radical” for parliament. In it he said he felt the nation of England needed to move toward the democratic principle. Then he spent most of his career embracing the aristocratic.  

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“I think it better that in times like these
 A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth
 We have no gift to set a statesman right”

-        William Butler Yeats, “On being asked for a War Poem.”

The above epigraph demonstrates one reason why Contarini Fleming is as valuable a work as it is. When such a poet as Yeats shows reluctance to voice political opinions because poets lack the “gift to a set a statesman right,” he obviously wasn’t thinking of statesmen who doubled as poets, like Disraeli. What advice does the poet-statesman give himself? Can a poet-statesman set himself right? In Contarini Fleming the double temperament seems mainly a source of psychological conflict within himself. In the end of the book, Disraeli is unable to choose between his poetic side and his political side. His most valued advisor, Peter Winter, tells him it is time to abandon “meditation,” meaning the long period of romantic gestation that precedes his fast writing process. It is time for action, Winter tells him, and that means he should “create.” That’s an interesting conclusion for a book that previously associated the word “action” not with poetic creation but with politics. Contarini’s father in the book, while modeled on his writer dad, becomes prime minister of their northern European nation, and then gives Contarini a job as his secretary. After one remarkable scene in which Contarini single-handedly resolves a diplomatic summit between European nations by threatening to have his country’s king elected democratically, Contarini’s father Baron Fleming predicts that one day Contarini too will be prime minister. This was of course a remarkable portent of things to come for Disraeli.

Contarini stays a fan of Voltaire’s, despite the plot twist of the band of bandits. At the diplomatic summit, he sits aside the conflagration and laughs uncontrollably, thinking, “Voltaire would soon settle this.” Disraeli stayed a Voltaire fan too. Having written a highly Voltairean satire titled Popanilla in 1828, he went on to identify Voltaire as a great man, suggesting that the man of letters is often a greater man than the statesman, with Voltaire as the prime example, saying he was clearly a greater man than the prime minister of France. But Disraeli wrote, as Schwarz and others have pointed out, like a romantic. He idolized Lord Byron, adopting his manner of dress and writing a novel (Venetia) in which a character based on Byron is the hero. His father stayed skeptical of the romantic poets, saying as much in notes transcribed by his son that were found at the family home after Disraeli's death. Of the romantic poets, Isaac praised only Byron, perhaps as has been suggested only because that poet was a huge fan of D’Israeli’s own work (by Clarence Lee Cline in a fascinating 1941 paper revealing the contents of previously unpublished remarks by D’Israeli on the romantic poets in the journal Studies in English). Like the romantic poets, however, Disareli evinced a nostalgia for medieval feudalism and seemed to embrace the notion of imagination as an innate capacity, as did many of the Romantics.

But just as Disraeli remained ambivalent about the temperaments described in the book (poetic, political; Romantic, Enlightenment) Contarini too ends on a note of ambivalence:

“Here let me pass my life in the study and the creation of the Beautiful. Such is my desire; but whether it will be my career is, I feel, doubtful. My interest in the happiness of my race is too keen to permit me for a moment to be blind to the storms that lour on the horizon of society. Perchance also the political regeneration of the country to which I am devoted may not be distant, and in that great work I am resolved to participate.”

In the writings that followed Contarini Fleming, Disraeli never quite shook the influence of this ambivalence. By his last book, Endymion, he is so mellow about politics that he makes his hero a Whig and celebrates the Whig culture of high society into which he was never allowed. That book’s lack of a thesis, unlike works like Sybil and Coningsby, disappoints one because once he reaches the highest stage of statesmanship in England he seems unable to give himself the advice Yeats said poets were often unable to give. Plus, the advice Disraeli the poet gave himself as Disraeli the statesman was often deplorable, such as his standing up not for the "democratic principle" but for a parliament of enlightened aristocrats. 

There is also evidence that Disraeli never entirely shook what some have suspected was his bipolar disorder. In his days as prime minister he was reportedly paranoid, obsessed, as was Contarini Fleming in portions of the book, with conspiracy. Contarini reports that “fancied I had a predisposition” for “conspiracies.” Disraeli’s right hand man as prime minister, Salisbury, who he is said to have relied upon for much of the legislation, said of Prime Minster Disraeli, the first Earl of Beaconsfield: “What with deafness, ignorance of French, and Bismarck’s extraordinary mode of speech, Beaconsfield has the dimmest idea of what’s going on – understands everything crossways – and imagines a perpetual conspiracy.” 

Thus it seems the poetic skill is not the key to immaculate statesmanship, whether born of the 18^th or 19^th Century.