DISRAELI’S WIFE.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 5078, 21 January 1927, Page 4

DISRAELI’S WIFE.

STORY OF A RICH WIDOW.

SORDID UNION ENDS IN ROMANCE.

When the cynic asserted that widows are always rich, what precisely did he mean ? Was it that they were believed t.o. be rich, or let it be thought that they were, or that the man -who married one of thepi was after money, or that the public said he was after her'for. her money ? The popular judgment on widows is very severe, even widows’ weeds being interpreted as merely another way of advertising for a ne whusband. A hardened worldling declared that the rich widow cries with one eye and laughs with the other. Addison thought widows the most perverse people in the world, but the elder Weller was more trenchant than all the critics : “Take example, by your father, my boy; be very careful o’ widders all your life.” When a widow has inherited some wealth she is sure t,o' be heard df. One of the most outstanding instances in last century was that o’f Mrs Wyndham Lewis, who married Benjamin Disraeli in 1839. Her first husband had been one of the members o'f Parliament for Maidstone, and Disraeli was the. other. According to Disraeli she was a pretty little woman, a rattle, a flirt, and very voluble. .She was a dozen years older that Disraeli, and an acquaintance had the wretcher taste to say to him, “What 'feeling can you possibly have for that old woman ?’’ Instead of knocking the fellow down, Disraeli quietly replied: “One that is foreign to your nature, a,nd which you could not ' What he meant was that she had brought him a fine house in Park Lane and about £5OOO a year. To a politician with endless ambition, and sure of his ability, this was Of great importance. He himselF confessed that when he first made his advances he was prompted by no romantic feelings, yet his letters to her tell quite another tale. The day after she bad left London on a visit he wrote to her, “All is dull, silent, spiritless.; the charm is broken, the magic is fled !” Love even drove him to poetry, not an unusual experience, l.ut in Disraeli’s case he. went, on to the composition o’f a great tragedy. “I wrote your name in large characters and placed it before me. I remembered your parting injunctions. 1. poured all my spirit into my tragedy. There is no hell on earth like separated love.”

But the course of true love never did run smooth. He was eager and impulsive ; she was colder and had reached the. period at which feeling waits upon judgment. She persisted in having no open engagement till the conventional year, had passed, and the biographer thinks she was not unmindful of those elusive 'feminine arts by which a lover is. at once baffled and fascinated. Among her letters 'found after her death there is one which tells the story of their first and last serious quarrel. He says he was humiliated and distressed, and desired to quit her house for ever. He tells her the naked truth. He had thought her amiable, tender yet acute, and gift,e.d with no ordinary mind, one who' would share his triumph and happiness. "Now for your fortune; I write the sheer truth. That proved to be much less than I or the world imagined.’' He. could not eat and sleep in that house without 'feeling himself a penniless adventurer. Her allowance could not benefit him, and he would not condescend to be the minion df a princess. His nature demanded that, his life should be perpetual love. He, closed his letter with, an histrionic farewell. Of course the quarrel was made up. She wrote him for God’s sake to come to her, ’for she was ill and distracted. In later days she used to say: “ ‘Dizzy’ married me for my money, but if he had the chance again he. would marry me for love.” In a curious document she analyses her husband’s character and her own under seventeen headings. She describes him as never irritable, and herself as very irritable.; he is very calm, while she is> effervescent; he is a genius and she is a dunce. Her 'friends thought her. vain and shallow, irresponsible and tactless, bizarre and unconventional to a. degree that often embarrassed her circle. Yet she had rare intuition and judgment, and her husband confessed- that she was the most cheerful and the most courageous woman he ever knew. Their married life was full of happiness. She was a perfect wife and a perfect companion.