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Isaac D’Israeli and the Invention of the Literary Character
Sean Gaston
THE IDEALITY OF THE LITERARY CHARACTER
On 31st January 1795, the twenty-nine year old Isaac D’Israeli(1766-1848) wrote to the antiquarian Francis Douce, ‘I have passed about six weeks, in something like Literary Solitude: at least I have been master of my evenings. The consequence of this six weeks, is, that I am now publishing a little book […] entitled An Essay on the Genius & Manners of the Literary Character’.[1] D’Israeli opens his letter by referring to his ‘present retirement’ in Exeter. In 1794, he had suffered some form of collapse or breakdown and would remain in Exeter until late 1796. In his letterto Douce, D’Israeli goes on to note how‘politics divide men’ in these ‘terrible times’ and meditateson the possibility of improving on Thomas Warton’s efforts and of writing a new ‘History of English Literature’.
Over the next two years, D’Israeli would provide his correspondent with constant reports on the precarious state of his health. [2] In October 1795,he writes of his ‘extreme ill health’ and confesses that he has been suffering from an ‘afflicting nervous disorder’.[3] ‘A great alteration has taken place in my health’, he remarks in February 1795. A year later, in January 1796, he simply states: ‘I am very ill’. In June 1796, already thinking of his return to London, D’Israeli observes, ‘My health is always indifferent. My spirits low. I shall live a little in the bustle of Literary Circles in London’.[4] Of this period of illness that left him in self-imposed exile in Exeter, his son Benjamin Disraeli would later write his father suffered from a ‘mysterious illness’ that ‘especially’ affects ‘literary men’. Benjamin Disraeli describes this literary illness as ‘a failing of nervous energy occasioned by study and too sedentary habits, early and natural reveries, restless and indefinite purpose’.[5] It was D’Israeli himself who had done much to provide a template for the common traits of those who spend a lifetime writing and reading in An Essay on the Genius and Manners of the Literary Character (1795)and in its second edition,The Literary Character, Illustrated by the History of Men of Genius(1818).
For D’Israeli, the literary character is a broad term that includes not only literary authors but also men of letters, historians, philosophers, essayists and artists. In the 1795 Essay, D’Israeli draws a distinction between the ‘author’ and ‘the man of letters’, the former writing and creating literary works and the latter devoting its literary pursuits chiefly to study and research. Of literary authors, D’Israeli observes, ‘the vivacity and enthusiasm of genius’ often produce ‘violations of delicacy and truth’. [6] Men of geniusare ‘in an eternal conflict with the usages of common life’ and distinguished by ‘an irritability of disposition’ (E 103-4). The man of letters, in contrast, ‘is in general, a more amiable character than the author. His passions are more serene, his studies more regular, his solitude more soothing’ (E 12). Nonetheless, D’Israeli argues, the character of the man of letters is also altered by its literary preoccupations: ‘it may be said of the man of letters, that he does not live, but meditates. He feels that pleasing anxiety, which zests desire, arising from irritative curiosity’.[7]
While the literary author remains the seat of genius and ‘the fervid labours of high invention’, D’Israeli will go on to insist ‘it is the indispensible duty of an author to be a man of letters’ (E 21, 12). This might be taken as an attempt by D’Israeli to balance the inherent instability of the writer’s life with the patient labour and judicious reflection of the man of letters. However, the Essay suggests that for both the literary author and the man of letters the life spent in writing and reading is always more than the sum of its antecedents, its contexts and particular experiences. There is an unavoidable excessive quality to the literary character, whether it is formed chiefly by writing or reading. For D’Israeli, the pursuit of the literary creates a set of common characteristics for the manners, the genius and tragedy of the individual literary life. The literary character is defined by a perpetual disinheritance or the constant imperative to break away from its own time and place and the world into which it was born. As D’Israeli observes, ‘the first step into life of a man of genius is disobedience and grief’ (E 10).
A rather neglected work of the mid 1790s by an author who is chiefly known as a compiler of literary anecdotes and curiosities (the amenities, calamities and quarrels of authors) and for being the father of Benjamin Disraeli, the 1795 Essay offers a distinctive analysis of the literary character in Britain before the emergence of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt and Keats. Interestingly, D’Israeli seems to have had little or no impact on the first generation of British Romantic writers. Presenting itself as a kind of history of literature, the Essay relies on a profound idealisation of the literary character. For D’Israeli, a life spent writing and reading makes the literary character: the character of the writer is an ideal literary affect founded on trans-historical characteristics.[8] Rather than a precursor of contemporary historicism or cultural studies, as his work has recently been read, D’Israeli’s innovative account of the literary character suggests that the literary cannot simply illustrate a literary history. [9] Literary history is a source but it is not the limit of his work (E iv).
The view that the literary can be taken as an illustration or transparent window of the historical not only reconfirms Plato’s reduction of the literary to mimesis in the name of a historicism but also belies that the literary character can be treatedin this period as an instance of a trans-historical but not a-historical idealisation. [10] D’Israeli’s unrealised ambitions to write a definitive ‘History of English Literature’ reflect in part his struggle to place the recognition of the trans-historical and ideal literary character in a conventional historical context. This trans-historical understanding of the literary also owes a great deal to his lifelong interest in Jean-Jacques Rousseau as an exemplary literary character. In the wake of the rise of empiricism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, D’Israeli’s work suggests that the literary character can be treated as an idealisation of the empirical, as an ideality thathas empirical effects. As his other works from the 1790s attest, particularly his anti-Jacobin novel Vaurien; or, Sketches of the Times (1797), haunted by the ever present possibility of ‘speculative phantoms’ and driven by the need to adhere to the factual accounts of individual literary lives,D’Israeli can be seen as a reluctant but unswerving theoretician of literature who repeatedly warns against the dangers of ungrounded theoretical analysis.
THE COMMUNITY OF SOLITUDE
At the outset of the Essay, D’Israeli recognises that there are common and even universal qualities in the literary character. Despite living in different countries, different times and working in different mediums (poetry, history, philosophy, art), ‘there is a similarity in the characters of Men of Genius’ (E iii). D’Israeli will contrast this community of shared characteristics to the plight of the isolated and solitary life of the literary character. Classed under no single profession and lacking any ‘common association’ or ‘domestic seat’ in Britain in the 1790s, such as an Academy of polite literature, D’Israeli argues that the literary character is ‘exposed’ in general ‘to an ugly family of particular misfortunes’. Part of his task is to give these ‘scattered and solitary’ figures a common identity and a national stature (E 1-2). [11] At the same time, D’Israeli’s work is marked by a tension between an ideal community of shared characteristics, behaviours and experiences and the reality of an individual literary life lived in isolation and neglect. His emphasis on the common literary character as a solitary life, a life without an ostensible community that is still always part of a greater trans-national and trans-historical community, reinforces the inherent idealization of his project. The literary will always look beyond the facts of the solitary literary life, not least because the unique solitude of the community always transcends its own time and place.
It is first and foremost the choice of literary solitude that defines the manner and genius of the literary character.[12] As D’Israeli remarks, ‘solitude is the nurse of enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is the parent of genius’ (E 60). He argues that ‘Literary Retirement’ affords a unique opportunity for viewing the work of the past in an impartial manner. At a certain remove from the present, the literary character is able to hear the voices of the past with an exceptional clarity. The community of the solitary is limited and dispersed in present times, but it extends into the vast resources of the work of past writers, historians and artists. Powerless in the present, it enjoys the power of the literary throughout the ages.
In the context of an impoverished present that is infinitely enriched by the past, D’Israeli celebrates a literary community that can only be found ‘in deepest solitude’(E 65). At the same time, as much as he applauds the ‘necessity’ and ‘pleasures’ of this literary solitude, D’Israeli is clearly aware of its profound ‘inconveniences’. The solitude ‘which is sought by the young student is not borne without repining’, he notes, ending his meditations on literary solitude with‘the neglect of the world’ that brings the literary character so much pain and grief (E 63, 72, 76). For the men and women of letters, he observes, so often ‘the craving void remains unfilled’ (E 71).
Whilst distinguishing the literary character from ‘those who disgrace letters and humanity by an abject devotion to their private interests’, D’Israeli returns again and again in the Essay to the inadequate and disappointing domestic relationships of the literary character (E 4). Capable of great literary friendship and enmity, the literary character makes an undutiful son, a disagreeable companion and an indifferent husband (E 57). These friendships are ‘ardent’, but ‘rare’ and require nothing less than a complete union of judgement and taste that transcends all ‘private passions’ (E 127). More often than not, the literary character will also turn against its fellow writers. As D’Israeli observes, ‘It is remarkable that those men in the nation who are most familiar with each other’s conceptions, and most capable of reciprocal esteem, are those who are often most estranged’ (E 2). Though rising above private interest, they can also often succumb to ‘self-love’ and the envious comparisons of amour propre (E 121).
At the same time, nurtured in the shared community of literary solitude, the literary character also has a unique capacity to understand the nature of the human heart in general or even in universal terms. Struggling with the particular, literary characters embrace the universal. The literary character may be founded on particular ‘facts’ but it seems to have no understanding of its own most particular ‘facts’. When it comes to ‘the human heart’,D’Israeli remarks, it is condemned to the insight of ‘general principles’ (E 173).
POWER AND POWERLESSNESS
The status of writers may vary in different historical epochs but the essence of the literary character and its essential solitude does not change (E ix-xv). It is from this community of literary solitude that crosses national borders and historical epochs that D’Israeli offers a more conventional account of the genius and the ‘fervid labours of high invention’ (E 20-1, 84). At the same time, more interestingly, the literary character is distinguished by a social ineptitude, an eccentricity and irritability that isolates it from its own nation, neighbours, friends and family. D’Israeli also insists that this ineptitude often gives the literary character a unique national and trans-national power. Separated from the common habits and customs of society, literary characters are nonetheless ‘men whose particular genius often becomes that of a people; the sovereigns of reason; the legislators of morality; the artificers of our most exquisite pleasures’ (E 2). Marlborough may have won a great battle, D’Israeli observes, but Addison has changed a country (E 168). Beyond its own national borders, the literary character has even ‘subjugated the minds of millions by the energy of an intellectual sovereignty’ (E 88, 103-4, 180). ‘The people are a vast body, and men of genius are the eyes and hands’, D’Israeli concludes.
The unique power of the literary character lies in the fact that a single book can change the ‘public mind’. The publications of Montesquieu and Harrington truly altered the political landscape of their respective countries (E 183, 192). This also means that ‘the dangerous writer spreads a contagion throughout a nation’ and D’Israeli will return to this theme in Vaurien (E 181). This remarkable power is tempered by the acknowledgement that even such august literary characters have no control over the reception or interpretation of their work (E 10). The literary character is an exceptional mix of the unprecedented influence of one individual and the unavoidable inability to control this influence.
This is in part the consequence of literary genius, which offers a particular exceptionality but no guarantee of wider abilities (E 97). But even when the literary character enjoys public recognition, it will often be the work and not the man that is celebrated. As D’Israeli notes, ‘His works they applaud, because that is fashionable, but they negate the author, who may happen to be very unfashionable. The man of genius sits like a melancholy eagle whose pinions are clipped, and who is placed to roost among domestic fowls’ (E 92). It is the literary work that will retain the power without reference to the author, not least because these works do not reveal any truths about the character of the author. For D’Israeli,‘the writings of an author give no indication of his personal character’ (E 145).
ANTECEDENTS WITHOUT PRECEDENT
D’Israeli’s emphasis on the solitary nature of a literary character that must look beyond its domestic life and present national preoccupations to find an elusive but persistent sense of a community of writers and readers is also reflected in his own limited reliance on the previous work on the literary character in Britain. In his search for antecedents D’Israeli would have to look elsewhere and one can argue that the 1795Essay marks a break with the style and content of the literary scholarship of the previous half-century. There is a pervasivesense of an unavoidable disinheritance that distinguishes D’Israeli’s work on the literary character. This disinheritance is most apparent in his lifelong interest in Rousseau as the ideal literary character.
Benjamin Disraeli considered the 1795 Essay his father’s most original work, noting: ‘before his time, the Literary Character had never been fairly placed before the world. He comprehended its idiosyncrasy: all its strength and all its weakness’.[13] And despite Robert Griffin’s eloquent case for the formulation of key romantic concepts in the 1740s and 1750s, it is evident that D’Israeli could not find his conceptual framework for the literary character in the work of either Joseph and Thomas Warton or Samuel Johnson. [14] He considered Thomas Warton, the author of the History of English Poetry (1774-1781), a fine writer but not a particularly gifted historian. [15] If Joseph Warton was ‘the first elegant scholar’ to provide a new vocabulary for poetic genius, as D’Israeli notes in an essay from 1796, he also had a lamentable ‘contempt of French critics’, the source of much of D’Israeli’s reflections on the literary. [16]
As a homo novus who was interested in ‘the Literary Biography of our own Country’, one might have expected that D’Israeli would have found a model in Samuel Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets (1779-1781). [17] As Benjamin Disraeli relates in his testament to his father, in 1784 the eighteen-year old D’Israeli had first thought of Johnson and sent his early poems to the great man only a few weeks before his death. Too ill to read the poems, Johnson had not replied. According to his son, D’Israeli was at this time driven by ‘the paramount desire to find some sympathising sage’, and it was perhaps the failure to find this recognition in Johnson – or any comparable living figure in Britain – that led the young D’Israeli to Paris and to Rousseau. [18]
D’Israeli had a complex relationship to Johnson. [19] His first publication, a short piece in the Gentleman’s Magazine from 1786, had been a heartfelt defence of Johnson. [20] However, by the 1790s while still applauding Johnson’s ‘great mind’, he is also critical of his ‘turgid declamation’ and ‘rigid virtue’.[21] To take one important example of this, while Richard Terry has justly observed that Johnson’s Lives‘scratches beneath the surface and official appearance of the public person to reveal the human idiosyncrasies and fragility lying beneath’, one can see a ‘rigid virtue’ in Johnson’s critical judgement of Abraham Cowley’s well-known retreat from public life as an act of ‘cowardice’.[22] For D’Israeli, the choice of literary solitude was fundamental in the formation of the literary character (E 61).
In Miscellanies; or Literary Recreations (1796), a collection of essays published the year after the Essay, D’Israeli had written of French literature: