1
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 letter to Douce, D’Israeli goes on to note how ‘politics divide
men’ in these ‘terrible times’ and meditates on 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
2
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 genius are ‘in an eternal conflict
with the usages of common life’ and distinguished by ‘an irritability of disposition’ (E 1034). 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
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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 treated in this period as an
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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 that has 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
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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).
6
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
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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).
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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 1795 Essay marks a break with the style and
content of the literary scholarship of the previous half-century. There is a pervasive sense 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
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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:
He who has formed a task, and he who has matured his taste into a passion for
literary history, and the wide circle of literary information, can no where gratify
it, but in French literature; no European nation has yet equalled the varieties of
their researches; the diversifications of their criticism; and the multitude of their
anecdotes; for no one has yet felt an equal passion for the Belles Lettres. 23
Unable to find the antecedents for his re-invention of the literary character in Britain,
D’Israeli turned to French Literature and, in particular, to Rousseau. He was in Paris in 1788
10
and possibly again in 1789 and would have greeted the publication of the second part of
Rousseau’s Confessions as a new work and the latest offering of French literature. 24
D’Israeli introduces his discussion of literary solitude in the Essay by citing a very
particular scene from Rousseau’s Confessions, itself an extraordinary testament to the variety
and innovation of French literature in the late Enlightenment period. D’Israeli writes: ‘It is
therefore an interesting observation for a man of letters, and an artist, to liberate himself early
from domestic anxieties. Let him, like Rousseau, leave the rich financier, (though he might
become one himself,), sell his watch, and issue from the palace, in independence and
enthusiasm’ (E 59). D’Israeli is referring to the events in 1751, related in Book Eight of the
Confessions, after Rousseau’s First Discourse has been published. 25 Rousseau writes:
As soon as my mind was made up and my resolution fully confirmed, I wrote a
note to M. de Francueil informing him of it, thanking him, as well as Mme Dupin,
for all their kindness and asking them for custom. Francueil, who could make no
sense at all of my note, and who concluded that I must still be in the throes of
fever, hurried round to see me; but he found me so firm in my resolve that he
could not shake me out of it. He went off to tell Mme Dupin and everybody else
that I had gone mad. I let them talk and carried on undeterred. I began my
reform with that of my appearance; I gave up gold trimmings and white
stockings, took to a short wig, laid aside my sword, and sold my watch, saying to
myself as I did so, with a feeling of unbelievable joy: I will never again, thank
God, need to know what time it is. 26
D’Israeli’s interest in this passage highlights what he sees as the necessary rupture or break
with the demands of the present world that defines the literary character. The literary
character must at all costs gain ‘independence’.
11
D’Israeli’s view of the essential qualities of the literary character in the Essay are to a
large extent inspired by the life of Rousseau and by Rousseau’s own autobiographical works.
Significantly, Rousseau argues at the outset of the Confessions that the true account of the
genius of the literary character is utterly unique and cannot in be copied or imitated. He
writes: ‘I am resolved on an undertaking that has no model and will have no imitator’. 27
While this might appear to invalidate D’Israeli’s attempts to account for the common
qualities of literary characters throughout the ages, this gestures to one of the most distinctive
aspects of the Essay. D’Israeli suggests that the gaining of genius through hard work requires
imitation over many years, but this imitation must always be directed ultimately to imitating
what cannot be imitated, to ‘the painful exertion of invention’ (E 16). Learning through
repetition, true literary genius must do more than repeat what can be repeated (E 101).
GENIUS AND BIOGRAPHY
For D’Israeli, long and diligent study of ‘models’ is essential in constructing the genius of
the literary character (E 49). As James Malek has pointed out, in contrast to the advocates of
an innate or natural genius, which included Rousseau, D’Israeli believed that genius is not
merely innate and can be acquired. 28 D’Israeli’s position on genius may have been
influenced by William Sharpe. Relying heavily on Locke, in A Dissertation upon Genius
(1755), Sharpe was at pains ‘to discourage all pretenses to extraordinary abilities engrafted
by abstract nature’, insisting on the ‘necessity of instruction and information’ in the
formation of genius. For Sharpe, biography is indispensable in understanding the genius of
the literary character, because genius is formed by the difference and inequality of ‘fortune,
education, interest, ambition, degrees of health, [and] passions’. 29 As Sharpe concludes,
‘every man is, if not the founder, yet the refiner and polisher, of his own Genius’. 30
12
In arguing for the central importance of imitation and study in the formation of genius –
and implicitly for the importance of biography in understanding literary history – D’Israeli
was also rejecting the well-known arguments of Edward Young. Young reinforced Joseph
Warton’s criticisms of Pope in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) by
associating Pope with servile and unoriginal imitation. 31 According to Young, ‘Genius is
from Heaven, Learning from Man’ and ‘illustrious Examples [can only] engross, prejudice,
and intimidate’. Young concluded, ‘so bloodless are the bold excursions of the human mind,
that is the vast void beyond real existence, it can call forth shadowy beings, and unknown
worlds, as numerous, as bright, and, perhaps, as lasting, as the stars’. 32
When it comes to Rousseau, D’Israeli’s rejection of the natural genius of the literary
character as a ‘vast void beyond real existence’ is complex. He clearly believes that the
literary character needs to read as many biographies about men of genius as possible.
Rousseau’s Confessions introduce a new factor into this history: the confessional
autobiography of the man of genius. At the same time, his belief that genius is acquired and
not natural prompts one of his few direct criticisms of Rousseau in the 1790s. In ‘On
Literary Genius’, an essay collected in the Miscellanies of 1796, D’Israeli adds a long
endnote in which he sides with Helvétius in his dispute with Rousseau over the natural
origins of genius. 33
AN INHERITED DISINHERITANCE
D’Israeli suggests in the Essay that as part of a solitary community that transcends its own
time and place and looks to the literary to define its common traits, the literary character
cannot be described through a conventional genealogy of antecedent and inheritance. The
literary character can only mark its inheritance – and its claims to an acquired genius –
13
through a distinctive experience of disinheritance: an inherited disinheritance. Over the
centuries, the singular lives of the literary characters have passed on this universal imperative
of disinheritance: you alone will inherit what cannot be inherited; you alone will imitate
through diligent study and practice what cannot be imitated.
What makes Rousseau so significant for D’Israeli is that he provides a model for the
genius of the literary character that is based on the insistence that true genius can have no
model. Inspired by the Confessions, D’Israeli constructs a narrative of necessary
disinheritance as the possibility of literary genius. Socially isolated when young, only truly
active in his or her mind, at an early age the literary character becomes an orphan and ‘an
isolated wanderer’ (E 30-1). Born into an ordinary family, regardless of its social and
economic standing, the literary character must always reject his or her own inheritance (E 267). If anything, this rejection is also the possibility of changing one’s social status. As
D’Israeli comments, ‘the greater part of our first authors have ennobled themselves, and
owed nothing to their parents’ (E 154). This rejection is compounded by the common
experience of a lack of encouragement and clear misunderstanding. At this early stage,
genius cannot be seen: it can only be experienced (E 31). As D’Israeli observes, ‘let us place
ourselves in the situation of a parent of a man of genius: we see a great man, they a
disobedient child; we see genius, they obstinacy’ (E 41).
Commonly finding itself in ‘inauspicious circumstances’ and ‘remote from the world of
taste’, the literary character must also endure – and dismiss – the ‘unnatural barbarity’ and
‘want of discernment’ of the ‘literary man or artist’ who crushes the first signs of ‘juvenile
genius’ (E 31-2). The necessary disobedience and dispossession of young literary genius
marks a painful but necessary break in the customary organic and natural development of an
individual. As D’Israeli remarks: ‘We never read the biography of a great character, whether
he excelled in letters, or the fine arts, without reprobating the domestic persecution of those,
14
who opposed his inclinations, and endeavoured to unfeather the tender pinion of juvenile
genius’ (E 40-1).
The mechanism for this inherited disinheritance is primarily literary. In the formation of
the literary character, it is neither family, nor friends, nor apparent mentors that matter – only
books. One inherits the disinheritance of genius only through reading. It is in reading
beyond and outside of the social environment that one is born into that makes a literary
character and shapes character as a literary affect. One becomes a literary character through
this perpetual dislocation. For D’Israeli, the literary has the power to alter and determine
character. One does not simply have a character as an inherited or self-formed human
attribute: one has acquired a literary character and its distinctive history, its relation to the
present and the past. Reading forms the literary character as a character that has been
determined by literary works across the ages, giving it a unique historical perspective that is
trans-historical not but a-historical.
While D’Israeli suggests the literary character is not simply a mirror of the fixed epochs
and linear influences of the kind of literary history written by Warton and others, he also
argues that the literary character cannot be contained or even accurately understood by
limiting it to its own present times and immediate historical contexts. To put this in more
contemporary terms, without falling into Arthur Lovejoy’s confident assertion of an almost
impervious idea gliding across history largely untouched by its different contexts, one does
not necessarily need to accept Quentin Skinner’s alternative of an idea that is situated in an
almost impervious comprehensive historical field. 34 As Martin Jay has recently pointed out,
historical events can also be understood by their aftermath and not only by their pre-existing
contexts. 35 The distinctive history of the literary character is found not in its present times
but in an ‘undetermined future’. 36
15
Far from contradicting Rousseau’s insistence that the genius of the literary character has
‘no model’, D’Israeli’s injunction to read those who have ‘no imitator’ only reinforces that
reading outside of one’s present circumstances constructs the singularity of the genius of the
literary character. It is in this sense that we can understand that Cicero and Samuel Johnson
share the same struggles as literary characters because they ‘have no imitator’. As D’Israeli
writes to the would-be literary character: ‘If in meditating on the confessions of Rousseau, he
recollects that he has experienced the same sensations from the same circumstances, and that
he has encountered the same difficulties, and vanquished them by the same means; he may
hope one day that the world will receive them as their benefactor’ (E 50-1).
STAYING WITH ROUSSEAU
Contrary to the view of Dino Franco Felluga, who argues that in the 1818 Literary
Character D’Israeli changes his position in relation to Rousseau and ‘reworks any former
praise and defense of Rousseau into admonition and warning’, there are in fact more
references to Rousseau in the second edition of the Essay and a number of key passages are
retained from the 1795 edition. 37 Rousseau remains the ideal literary character for D’Israeli.
If nothing else, the subtitle of the 1818 edition, ‘Drawn from their Feelings and Confessions’,
highlights the importance of D’Israeli’s revised version of the 1795 passage on Rousseau’s
Confessions that I have just quoted:
If in meditating on the Confessions of Rousseau, or on these of every man of
genius, for they all have their confessions, you recollect that you have
experienced the same sensations from the same circumstances, and that you have
encountered the same difficulties and overcome them by the same means, then let
not your courage be lost in your admiration, – but listen to that ‘still small voice’
16
in your heart, which cries with Corregio and with Montesquieu, ‘Ed io anche son
pittore!’ [And I too am a painter!] (LC 74). 38
The peculiarity of these confessions, which resist any kind of imitation, only enhances the
shared solitude and inherited disinheritance of the literary character.
In 1795, D’Israeli obliquely alludes to the more controversial aspects of the Confessions,
while affirming that Rousseau remains the best guide to understanding the common qualities
of the literary character (E 87). In the second edition of 1818, D’Israeli is able to discuss
openly what he considers to be Rousseau’s greatest fault: his ‘low marriage’ and his failure to
educate his ignorant wife. At the same time, he emphasizes that Rousseau has himself both
‘honestly confessed his error’ and indicated ‘the right principle’ (LC 262). 39 The chief
difference between the two editions is that the 1818 work is, if anything, more confessional
and in this sense is more faithful to the spirit of Rousseau’s work. The second edition attests
to the importance of the confessional autobiography of writers of genius in forming the
literary character.
While it may not be that remarkable that by 1797 D’Israeli had severe misgivings about
the intellectual arguments supporting the revolution in France, it is perhaps more striking that
after the events of 1793-1794 in both France and England he remained an enthusiastic
advocate of the genius of Rousseau. A short piece on D’Israeli himself from the mid 1790s
observes that he feels ‘with all the energy of taste, the rich imagination and seductive periods
of Rousseau’. 40 More tellingly, in the Hughenden archives now held in the Bodleian Library
there is an affectionate satirical poem from 1791, written by his good friend Dr. Hugh
Downman, on D’Israeli’s ‘particularity for French writers’. After speaking of Montesquieu
and Voltaire, Downman turns to Rousseau:
17
Rousseau a Frenchman! He despaired the name;
On other sentiments he built his fame;
Not for Parisian converse was he born,
Their music and their manners were his scorn.
Journeying the spacious universe he loved,
In his small sphere a misanthrope he roved.
A victim to his discontent & pride
Without a real friend he lived and died. 41
While there is no direct reference to the political events in France at the time, the criticism
of Rousseau – based on his life – can be taken as an implicit warning against the political
enthusiasms that were being linked at the time to Rousseau’s name. Burke had recently
attacked Rousseau’s ‘mad Confession of his mad faults’ treating the work as an example of a
new ‘philosophy of vanity’. 42 D’Israeli himself made a point in the 1795 Essay of criticising
‘the perverted images’ of Burke’s infamous use of the phrase ‘the swinish multitude’ in his
attack on the French Revolution (E 69). Despite Downman’s satire, in the Essay D’Israeli
was still able to write: ‘how many noble conceptions of Rousseau are not yet mastered!’ (E
120). Unlike Coleridge, who also looked back from the vantage of some twenty years at his
writings of the late 1790s and did all he could to contain and domesticate his ‘psychological
curiosities’, D’Israeli remained faithful to Rousseau’s confessions as an emblem of the
literary character. At the same time, the second edition of the Essay does reflect an anxiety
that was already apparent in D’Israeli’s work in the late 1790s: the threat of metaphysical
abstractions to the literary character.
18
BETWEEN THE FACT AND THE PHANTOM
At the start of 1795 Essay, D’Israeli says that he will elaborate on the ‘dispositions of the
Literary Character’ by gathering together ‘a sufficient number of facts’ (E iii-iv). It is only
by starting from and relying on facts, he suggests, that one can avoid the illusions of mere
speculation. As he writes: ‘The more I meditate, the more I am persuaded that all
speculations are illusory and unsatisfactory, unless they are established on prominent facts,
which are to be first collected before we venture to indulge metaphysical disquisitions’ (E v).
At the start of the 1818 Literary Character, he reiterates this essential relation: ‘it is the
fashion of the present day to raise up dazzling theories of genius; to reason a priori – I have
sought for facts – I have looked into literary history for the literary character’. 43 At the same
time, as we have seen, for D’Israeli the literary character is always more than a collection of
facts: it reflects a complex series of trans-historical idealities, powers, dispossessions and
disinheritances that exceed the factual. Nonetheless, it is these gathered facts that give
D’Israeli the confidence in the 1795 Essay to assert the trans-historical ‘similarity in the
characters of Men of Genius’. The literary character is founded on a collection of facts that
will always exceed their historical and contextual particularity. These floating facts,
D’Israeli acknowledges, are always prey to the dangers of ‘speculative phantoms’ (E vii).
The literary character is situated between the fact and the phantom.
The new emphasis on facts in the eighteenth century of course also invited new elaborate
conceptual and speculative systems. D’Israeli insists on a clear distinction between the
empirical certainties of ‘practical philosophy’ and the airy nothings of ‘dreaming theorists’,
but like many other would-be empiricists in the eighteenth century his work generates its own
ideal, non-empirical concepts in the name of a complete empiricism (E 193-4). To just take
19
one example from the period, in his critical portrait of Jeremy Bentham in The Spirit of the
Age (1825), William Hazlitt captures the picture of the English philosopher of as a man of
facts. ‘He talks a great deal, and listens to nothing but facts’, Hazlitt observes. 44 At the
same time, Bentham’s preoccupation with facts and empirical data is always subsumed in a
larger theoretical framework. Hazlitt writes:
His eye is quick and lively; but it glances not from object to object, but from thought
to thought. He is evidently a man occupied with some train of fine inward
association. He regards the people about him no more than the flies of a summer. He
meditates the coming age. He hears and sees only what suits his purpose, or some
‘forgone conclusion’; and looks out for facts and passing occurrences in order to put
them into his logical machinery and grind them into the dust and powder of some
subtle theory, as the miller looks out for grist to his mill! 45
For D’Israeli, the ideality of the literary character requires an exceptional ‘continuity of
attention’ and an ‘intenseness of abstraction’ that – almost – makes philosophers of all
authors and men of letters (E 78). The literary character may also be visited by the
‘fortuitous’ enthusiasms of ‘active genius’. These can be so powerful that it ‘renders every
thing that surrounds us as distant as if an immense interval separated us from the scene’ (E
83). To maintain its stability and cohesion, the literary character must practice concentrated
abstraction and harness enthusiasm without succumbing to speculation or phantoms.
In Vaurien; or, Sketches of the Times: Exhibiting view of the Philosophies, Religions,
Politics, Literature, and Manners of the Age (1797), which has been called the first AntiJacobin novel, it is notable that D’Israeli does not explicitly include Rousseau amongst the
‘dangerous class of men’ that ‘unite politics with metaphysics’. 46 Vaurien attacks Thomas
20
Holcroft and William Godwin for advocating an abstract and metaphysical system of
‘perfectibility’ that invites a revolutionary politics of radical and complete change (V I: 36,
39-40). 47 In Vaurien, it is not Rousseau but Helvétius who is criticised. ‘Helvétius, the
fashionable French metaphysician’, D’Israeli writes, not only advocates an ‘infinite
perfectibility’ but also insists that it is primarily chance that forms and ruins genius (V II: x,
287, 160). 48 As one of the characters remarks on Helvétius’s theory of genius: ‘I see clearly
now, that we shall have no more any men of genius; for after all these pains, in which I am
sure no mortal must expect to be successful, the most inconsiderable accident may spoil the
whole man of genius’ (V II: 160). Perhaps one of the more notable revisions of the 1818
Literary Character is the removal of all the passages referring to Helvétius, whom D’Israeli
had praised in 1795 as ‘an accurate observer of men of genius’ (E 114). 49 In the 1818
Literary Character Helvétius is relegated to a single footnote (LC 202).
In Vaurien, the character Mr. Subtile is distinguished by his propensity ‘to arrange the vast
diversities of nature into the contractions of system’ (V I: 62). Mr. Subtile is in part based on
Godwin and described as a fanatic of reason: ‘With a fearless hand he drew a circle round
nature, and became that unreasonable being who reduced every thing to the line and compass
of human reason’ (V I: 62). It is worth noting here in passing that D’Israeli was an early
collector of Blake’s works and one could associate this image of Godwin with Blake’s
frontispiece of Europe a Prophecy (1794). 50 Mr. Subtile and Vaurien, the agent provocateur
who attempts to stir up revolutionary fervour in London, can both be taken as examples of the
genius of the literary character that has been overwhelmed by ‘speculative phantoms’, losing
itself in an endless ‘emphatic monotony’ of ‘gigantic ideas’ and ‘hyperbolical truths’. (V I:
63, 65). Vaurien is a ‘fervid genius [that] lived only in the ideal of the future; and his life
was a life of anticipation and disappointment’ (V I: 235).
21
D’Israeli contrasts these grand thinkers who have dissolved the moral world of facts into
an ungrounded abstraction of blind fanaticism to the genius of the literary character of Emily.
‘A person of true genius’, Emily embraces all ‘the enthusiasm of solitude’ and struggles to
maintain her independence in a dangerous world of patronage and radical politics (V II: 1-2,
28, 102, 117, 126). As a literary character, Emily is the most faithful illustration of
D’Israeli’s idealized vision of Rousseau in the 1795 Essay. The negative examples of the
literary character in Vaurien can also be seen as a warning against the literary character that
devotes itself entirely to the present time. Preoccupied with the self-interest of their present
agency and future powers, these literary characters have foreclosed the necessary detachment,
powerlessness and disinheritance that both haunt and sustain the genuine literary character.
This should not suggest that the literary character is simply divorced from the social and
political context of its time or from a sense of moral responsibilities. For D’Israeli, literary
characters are drawn to the events of their own times for relief from the relentless solitude
and dislocation of the literary life and by the elusive promise that their single work may, one
day, refashion the age (E 45). This incessant dislocation from the present can give rise to an
‘active virtue’. Far from being disengaged, from its unique trans-historical vantage point the
literary character has access to a virtue that can only rarely be formulated amongst the
pressing interests of ‘the busy and the gay’ (E 61-2, 63). Written in the early months of 1795
in the midst of the war with France, D’Israeli ends the Essay with an impassioned call for
peace and a final sober recognition of the times in which he lives:
At the present melancholy moment, when Europe appears hostile to Reason, and
to Humanity, let us indulge the hope, that this institution [an academy of polite
literature] may become the ornament of PEACE––of a Peace, that by its duration
may resemble the vision of an admirable philanthropist and a poor politician, the
vision of the Abbè de Saint Pierre,––AN UNIVERSAL PEACE. When the
22
principle of Government is VIRTUE, the action of that Government will be
PEACE; Governments are, however, always in war (E 221-2). 51
Brunel University, London
23
NOTES
1
Bodleian, MS Douce d 33 11.
2
Bodleian, MS Douce d 33 16, 6, 12.
3
Bodleian, MS Douce d 33 14.
4
Bodleian, MS Douce d 33 12, 15, 25.
5
Benjamin Disraeli, ‘On the Life and Writings of Mr. D’Iisraeli. By his Son’ (1848), in
Marvin Spevack, ed., Isaac D’Israeli on Books: Pre-Victorian Essays on the History of
Literature (London: British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2004) xxvii.
6
Isaac D’Israeli, An Essay on the Genius and Manners of the Literary Character (London: T.
Cadell and W. Davies, 1795), 17. Further references to this work will be cited parenthetically
in the text as E followed by the relevant page number.
7
See Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001).
8
One can find a comparable example of this in Husserl’s late emphasis on the historicity of
ideal objects, see Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. and intro. David
Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). See also Jacques Derrida, Edmund
Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1989); ‘Punctuations: The Time of a Thesis’, in Eyes of the
University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2004), 115-16.
9
Jacques Derrida, ‘Le facteur de la vérité’, in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and
Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 419. On recent
24
readings of D’Israeli as a representative of historicism and cultural studies, see April London,
‘Isaac D’Israeli and Literary History: Opinion, Anecdote, and Secret History in the Early
Nineteenth Century History’, Poetics Today 26. 3 (2005): 351-86; Ina Ferris, ‘Antiquarian
Authorship: D’Israeli’s Miscellany of Literary Curiosity and the Question of Secondary
Genres’, Studies in Romanticism 45. 4 (2006): 523-42. On can contrast these to the account
of D’Israeli by Philip Connell, ‘Bibliomania: Book Collecting, Cultural Politics, and the Rise
of Literary Heritage in Romantic Britain’, Representations 71 (2000): 29-47.
10
Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1992), 595a-621d. See also, Jacques Derrida, ‘The Double Session’, in Dissemination, trans.
Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 173-285.
11
See Connell, ‘Bibliomania’, 36, 39.
12
See also Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Essential Solitude’, in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann
Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 19-34. There are some striking
similarities in D’Israeli’s project with the work of Blanchot, not only in the emphasis on
literary solitude and community but also in the broader sense of the literary shaping and
altering character.
13
‘On the Life and Writings of Mr. D’Israeli’, xxxii.
14
Robert S. Griffin, Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also, Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and
Writings of Pope, 3rd edn (London: J. Dodsley, 1782), v; Thomas Warton, The History of
English Poetry (London: J. Dodsley, 1774), Preface ii; Dissertation I ‘Of the Origins of
Romantic Fiction in Europe’ ii, lxi;
15
Isaac D’Israeli, The Illustrator Illustrated (London: Edward Moxon, 1838), 3.
16
Isaac D’Israeli, Miscellanies; or Literary Recreations (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies,
1796), 400.
25
17
Bodleian, MS Douce d 33 12.
18
‘On the Life and Writings of Mr. D’Israeli’, xxii.
19
D’Israeli ended one of his earliest publications with praise for Warton. See, Isaac
D’Israeli, A Dissertation on Anecdotes (London: C. G. Kearsley and J. Murray, 1793), 83.
20
Isaac D’Israeli, ‘Remarks on the Biographical Accounts of the Late Samuel Johnson L. L.
D’., Gentleman’s Magazine 56. 2 (December 1786): 1123-7. See also, James Ogden, Isaac
D’Israeli (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 12.
21
Isaac D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature: Consisting of Anecdotes, Characters, Sketches,
and Observations, Literary, Critical and Historical (London: John Murray, 1791), 82;
Dissertation, 37; Miscellanies, 31; LC 248.
22
Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past 1660-1781 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001) 250; Samuel Johnson, ‘Cowley’, in The Lives of the Most
Eminent English Poets; With Critical Observations in their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4
vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), I: 195.
23
Ogden, 17; Bodleian, MS Douce d 33 7 (28 September 1794); Miscellanies, 402.
24
Ogden states that D’Israeli was in Paris in 1788-1789 (16). In an appendix on chronology
to his collection of D’Israeli’s writings, Marvin Spevack has reviewed the ‘scant and
unreliable evidence’ for this claim and concludes that it is doubtful if D’Israeli was in Paris
when the revolution broke out. As Spevack remarks, it is highly unlikely that D’Israeli
would have witnessed these events and not written about them in any of his surviving letters
or numerous publications, Marvin Spevack, Curiosities Revisited: The Writings of Isaac
D’Israeli (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2007), 427-32.
25
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, ed. and intro. Patrick Coleman, trans. Angela Scholar
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 353.
26
26
Confessions, 354. See also Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and
Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, intro. Robert J. Morrisey (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988) 33-64; Nancy Youssef, Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy in
Enlightenment Philosophy and Romantic Literature (New York: Cornell University Press,
2004).
27
Confessions, 5. Writing of the moment when he decided to write the Confessions,
Rousseau later observes, ‘I resolved to make them a work that would be unique for a veracity
for which there would be no model’ (505).
28
James Malek, ‘Isaac D’Israeli, William Godwin, and the Eighteenth Century Controversy
over Innate and Acquired Genius’, Rocky Mountain Review 34.1 (1980): 48-64.
29
William Sharpe, A Dissertation upon Genius: Or, an Attempt to shew that several
Instances of Distinction, and Degrees of Superiority in the human Genius are, not
fundamentally, the Result of Nature, but the Effect of Acquisition (London: C. Bathurst,
1755), 5, 6, 11. See also 67, 75, 80.
30
A Dissertation upon Genius, 129.
31
Edward Young: Conjectures on Original Composition in a Letter to the Author of Sir
Charles Grandison (London: A. Millar and J. Dodsley, 1759), 58, 65, 68.
32
Conjectures on Original Composition, 36, 17, 42, 70.
33
Miscellanies, 421. This endnote refers to ‘On Literary Genius’, 264. See also. Claude
Adrien Helvétius, De l’esprit; or Essays on the Mind, and its Several Faculties (London: J.
Dodsley, 1759), 127-9, 153-60; A Treatise on Man, His Intellectual Faculties and his
Education, trans. W. Hooper, 2 vols (London: B. law and G. Robinson, 1777), I: 31-2; II: 1-2.
See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise: Letters of Two Lovers who Live in a
Small Town at the Foot of the Alps, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché (Hanover:
University Press of New England, 1997), 462-63 [V: II]. See also Jean H. Bloch, ‘Rousseau
27
and Helvétius on Innate and Acquired Traits: The Final Stages of the Rousseau-Helvétius
Controversy’, Journal of the History of Ideas 40.1 (1979): 21-41.
34
Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: The Study of the History of an Idea
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950 [1936]); Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and
Understanding in the History of Ideas’, in Visions of Politics: Volume I Regarding Method
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57-89.
35
Martin Jay, ‘Historical Explanation and the Event: Reflections on the Limits of
Contextualization’, New Literary History 42.4 (2011), 557-71. See also Claude Romano,
Event and World, trans. Shane Mackinlay (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).
I am grateful to Peter Otto for bringing this work to my attention.
36
‘Historical Explanation and the Event’, 569.
37
Dino Franco Felluga, The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular male
Poet of Genius (New York: State University of New York Press, 2005), 178 n. 13. See The
Literary Character, 34, 52, 58-9, 74, 81, 89, 90, 114, 174, 207-8, 226-27, 228, 240, 244-5,
246-7, 262, 328, 353. There are seventeen citations of Rousseau in the 1818 edition, as
opposed to eleven in the 1795 edition. A third edition appeared in 1822 and a fourth edition
in 1828. On the reception of Rousseau in Britain, see Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England:
The Context for Shelley’s Critique of the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1979); Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
38
See Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. and trans.
Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), xlv.
39
Confessions, 411.
28
40
British Public Characters of 1798 (London: R. Phillps, 1798), 462-66 (463). This was
originally published in the Monthly Mirror in 1796.
41
Hughenden Deposit 246/4: 95-6. ‘A Poetic Epistle to **** on his particularity for French
Writers written in 1791 by the late Dr. Downman of Exeter’. This poems was published
posthumously in 1809 as, ‘A Critical Epistle to ***, on his Partiality for French Writers’,
Gentleman’s Magazine 79 (1809): 959.
42
Edmund Burke, A Letter from Mr. Burke, to a Member of the National Assembly; in
answer to some objections on his book on French affairs (London: J. Dodsley, 1791), 33-4
43
Isaac D’Israeli, The Literary Character, Illustrated by the History of Men of Genius,
Drawn from their Feelings and Confessions (London: John Murray, 1818), iv. Further
references to this work will be cited parenthetically in the text as LC followed by the relevant
page number.
44
William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age or, Contemporary Portraits, intro. Robert Woof,
foreword Michael Foot (Kendal: The Wordsworth Trust, 2004), 90.
45
The Spirit of the Age, 90-1.
46
Isaac D’Israeli, Vaurien; or, Sketches of the Times: Exhibiting view of the Philosophies,
Religions, Politics, Literature, and Manners of the Age, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell and W.
Davies, 1797), I: viii. Further references to this work will be cited parenthetically in the text
as V, followed by the relevant volume number and page number. See Anti-Jacobin Novels,
ed. W. M. Verhoeven, vol 8, Isaac D’Israeli, Vaurien; or, Sketches of the Times (1797), ed.
and intro. Nicola Trott (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005). D’Israeli merely repeats
Helvétius’s charge from their dispute over whether genius was natural or acquired that
Rousseau ‘seems to have been a true Platonist’ (V I: 201).
47
This does raise the question of how well D’Israeli read Rousseau’s Second Discourse or
how profoundly it influenced his thought. Rousseau himself had noted that the ‘distinctive
29
and almost unlimited’ urge for perfectibility was the ‘source of all of man’s miseries’, JeanJacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, in
The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997), 141.
48
See also Vaurien, I: 75, 194-5.
49
See also The Literary Character, 36, 47, 111, 131, 151.
50
See David Bindman, The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1978), 167. Ogden notes that D’Israeli owned copies of The Book of Thel, The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The First Book of Urizen (43).
51
See also Miscellanies, 161. I would like to thank the staff at the Duke Humfrey Library,
the Special Collections Reading Room of the Bodleian Library and the Balliol College
Library at the University of Oxford. I am particularly grateful to the always helpful,
endlessly patient and remarkably well-informed staff of the Upper Reading Room of the
Bodleian Library, Ernesto Gómez, Sally Matthews, David Busby and Vera Ryhaljo. This
essay is dedicated to the late Vera Ryhaljo.