for our lives, which induced fatigue greater than I ever experienced, for there are no roads and we were never less than eight hours a day on…two little Andalusian mountain horses.5
Disraeli ended his long letter to Bradenham by sending his fondest regards to his ‘beloved Sa’ and ‘a thousand kisses’ to his ‘dearest mother’. ‘Tell Ralph I have not forgotten his promise of an occasional letter…And tell [Washington] Irving [whose Legends of Alhambra was to be published shortly] that he has left a golden name in Spain.’
Disraeli and Meredith were themselves so taken with Spain that they stayed there for two months, far longer than they had originally intended. In the middle of July, they went to Cadiz where ‘Figaro [was] in every street, and Rosina in every balcony’.6 And, towards the end of the month, they were in Seville, where Disraeli wrote to his father to tell him that, while his health had improved and the ‘fearful heat’ of Seville suited him, the improvement was ‘very slight’ and his recovery would, at best, be ‘a long affair’. He was even more pessimistic in a letter from Granada to his mother, to whom he complained about the palpitations in his heart and head which were followed by ‘an indescribable feeling of idiocy’ and ‘for hours’ he was ‘plunged into a state of the darkest despair’.
He was worried also by what he took to be incipient baldness: ‘I am sorry to say my hair is coming off, just at the moment it had attained the highest perfection, and was universally mistaken for a wig, so that I was obliged to let the women pull it to satisfy their curiosity. Let me know what my mother thinks. There are no wigs here that I cd wear. Pomade and all that is quite a delusion. Somebody recommends me cocoa-nut oil, which I cd get here, but suppose it turns it grey or blue or green?’
In her reply, Sarah told him that ‘Mamma advises him to try Coca-Nut or anything’. She was sure that she could arrange for him to be sent a wig.7
In a letter to his mother, he said that if he were a Roman Catholic he would enter a convent, ‘But as I am a member of a family to which I am devotedly attached and a good Protestant I shall return to them and to my country, and to a solitary room which I will never leave. I shall see no one and speak with no one. I am serious. Prepare yourself for this.’
The tone of the rest of his letter, however, belied this gloomy prognostication. Although, as he said, ‘rather an admirer of the blonde’, he wrote enthusiastically of Spanish ladies, ‘their glossy black hair and black mantillas, their gleaming eyes and dignified grace’. He wrote also of the delicious fruits of the Peninsula, of paella, ‘the most delicious dish in the world’, and of tomato sauce for which he provided a recipe – and, having done so, he added a note for his mother: ‘I need not tell the mistress [of] so experienced a cuisine as you to add a small quantity of onion in frying the tomatas.’8
I travelled through the whole of Andalusia on horseback [he reported with pride to Benjamin Austen]. I was never less than twelve hours on my steed, and more than once saw the sun set and rise without quitting my saddle, which few men can say, and I never wish to say again. I visited Cadiz, Seville, Cordova and Granada…I sailed upon the Guadalquivir, I cheered at bullfights; I lived for a week among brigands and wandered in the fantastic halls of the delicate Alhambra [a building which stood comparison, he thought, with the Parthenon and York Minster].
I entered Spain a sceptic with regard to their robbers, and listened to all their romances with a smile. I lived to change my opinion. I at length found a country where adventure is the common course of existence.9
‘Run, my dear fellow, to Seville,’ he told Austen in another letter, ‘and for the first time in your life know what a great artist is – Murillo, Murillo, Murillo!’10
On his way to Córdoba, riding by moonlight, his party’s guide suddenly informed them that ‘he heard a trampling of horses in the distance’, and Disraeli gave an entertaining description of his alarm in a letter to his sister:
Ave Maria! A cold perspiration came over me. Decidedly they approached, but rather an uproarious crew. We drew up out of pure fear, and I had my purse ready. The band turned out to be a company of actors travelling to Cordova. There they were, dresses and decorations, scenery and machinery, all on mules and donkeys. The singers rehearsing an opera; the principal tragedian riding on an ass; and the buffo, most serious, looking as grave as night, with a cigar, and in greater agitation than them all. Then there were women in side-saddles, and whole panniers of children…All irresistibly reminded me of Cervantes. We proceed and meet a caravan of armed merchants, who challenged us, and I nearly got shot for not answering in time. Then come two travelling friars who give us their blessing and then we lose our way. We wander about all night, dawn breaks, and we stumble on some peasants sleeping in the field amid their harvest. We learn that we cannot regain our road, and, utterly wearied, we finally sink to sound sleep with our pack-saddles for our pillows.11
The occasional complaints about his health in his letters are at odds with passages of cheerfully facetious self-congratulation:
I maintain my reputation of being a great judge of costume to the admiration and envy of many subalterns [he had written from Gibraltar]. I have also the fame of being the first who ever passed the Straits with two canes, a morning and an evening cane. I change my cane as the gun fires…It is wonderful the effect these magical wands produce.12
He later added a fan to his accoutrements, which made the canes ‘extremely jealous’.
At the Alhambra in Granada, so Meredith said, the elderly guide was convinced that Disraeli ‘was a Moor, many of whom come to visit this palace, which, they say, will be theirs yet again. His southern aspect, the style in which he paced the gorgeous apartments and sat himself in the seat of the Abencerrajes [a prominent family in the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada in the fifteenth century], his parting speech, “Es mi casa”, “This is my palace”, all quite deceived the guide.’
‘Oh! Wonderful Spain!’ Disraeli wrote enthusiastically to his sister on 14 August. ‘Think of this romantic land covered with Moorish ruins and full of Murillo!…I thought that enthusiasm was dead within me and that nothing could be new. I have hit perhaps upon the only country which could have upset my theory, a country of which I have read little, and thought nothing, a country of which, indeed, nothing has been written and which few visit.’ ‘I dare to say’, he added, ‘that I am better.’
He was occasionally homesick, though. ‘Write to me about Bradenham,’ he told Sarah, ‘about dogs and horses, gardens, who calls, who my father sees in London, what is said. That is what I want. Never mind public news…Keep on writing but don’t bore yourself. A thousand, thousand loves to all. Adieu, my beloved. We shall soon meet. There is no place like Bradenham, and each moment I feel better I want to come back.’13
A few days after this letter was written, Disraeli and Meredith sailed for Malta, where they were incarcerated for a week in the Lazaretto before being allowed out to take rooms at Beverley’s, a much better hotel than the ‘horrid’ Griffith’s Hotel in Gibraltar.
Valetta, the capital of Malta, was a place of which he expected nothing and found much, Disraeli wrote in a letter to Benjamin Austen. Indeed, he said, ‘it surprises me as one of the most beautiful cities I have ever visited, something between Venice and Cadiz…It has not a single tree but the city is truly magnificent, full of palaces worthy of Palladio.’14
Here they met a handsome and dissipated young man, a most energetic womanizer, James Clay, who had been at Oxford with Meredith. He was the son of a rich merchant and a nephew of Sir William Clay, Secretary to the