Had the Greek physician enquired not about the vestito, but about the wearer of it, the answer might have been the same.
The account of this visit to Yanina was composed after the return of the party to the yacht. Here is a description in Disraeli’s other manner:—
‘I write you this from that Ambracian gulf where the soft triumvir gained more glory by defeat than attends the victory of harsher warriors. The site is not unworthy of the beauty of Cleopatra. From the summit of the land the gulf appears like a vast lake walled in on all sides by mountains more or less distant. The dying glory of a Grecian eve bathes with warm light promontories and gentle bays and infinite modulation of purple outline. Before me is Olympus, whose austere peak glitters yet in the sun. A bend in the land alone hides from me the islands of Ulysses and Sappho. When I gaze upon this scene, and remember the barbaric splendour and turbulent existence which I have just quitted with disgust, I recur to the feelings in the indulgence of which I can alone find happiness and from which an inexorable destiny seems resolved to shut me out.’
In a sketch like the present the tour cannot be followed minutely. Athens is finely painted, but Disraeli’s classical education had been too imperfect to enable him to fill with figures and incidents the scenes which he was looking upon. The golden city was more after his heart. ‘It is near sunset,’ he wrote on November 20, ‘and Constantinople is in full sight. It baffles description, though so often described. I feel an excitement which I thought dead.’ He did describe, however, and drew magnificent pictures of the towns and palaces, and the motley-coloured crowd which thronged the bazaars. Lytton Bulwer was one of his London acquaintances. To him he wrote from Constantinople—
‘I confess to you that my Turkish prejudices are very much confirmed by my residence in Turkey. The life of this people greatly accords with my taste. To repose on voluptuous divans and smoke superb pipes, daily to indulge in the luxury of a bath which requires half a dozen attendants for its perfection, to court the air in a carved caique by shores which are a perpetual scene, and to find no exertion greater than a canter on a barb, this I think a more sensible life than the bustle of clubs, the boring of drawing-rooms, and the coarse vulgarity of our political controversies.’
THE PLAIN OF TROY
Disraeli’s English contemporaries who were aspiring to Parliamentary fame, and with whom in a few years he was to cross swords, were already learning the ways of the House of Commons, or training in subordinate official harness. Little would any of those who saw him lounging on divans, with a turban on his head and smoking cherry sticks longer than himself, have dreamt that here was the man who was to rise above them all and be Prime Minister of England. He too was forming himself for something, though as yet he could not tell for what. Ambitious visions haunted his imagination, even grander than he was ever to realise. On their way back through the Dardanelles the party paused for a sight of the Plain of Troy. As Disraeli stood on the sacred soil and gazed on the grass mound which was called the tomb of Patroclus, the thought passed through him that as the heroic age had produced its Homer, the Augustan era its Virgil, the Renaissance its Dante, the Reformation its Milton, why should not the revolutionary epoch produce its representative poet? Why should not that poet be himself? Why not but for two reasons? that the modern European revolution is disintegration and not growth, the product of man’s feebleness, not of his greatness, and therefore no subject for a poem; and again because Disraeli could never learn to detach himself from his work and forget the fame with which success was to reward him; and therefore to be a poet was not among the gifts which the Fates had in store for him. It was well for him, however, to indulge the dream. No man ever rises to greatness in this world who does not aim at objects beyond his powers.
Cyprus followed, and then Jaffa, and from Jaffa they crossed the mountains to Jerusalem. Disraeli was not given to veneration, but if he venerated anything it was the genius and destiny of his own race. Even the Holy City could not transport him out of himself, but it affected him more than anything which he had ever seen in his life. The elaborate but artificial account of his impressions, which is to be read in ‘Tancred,’ is a recollection of what he wrote to his sister about twenty years before.
‘From Jaffa, a party of six, well mounted and armed, we departed for Jerusalem, and crossed the plain of Ramle, vast and fertile. Ramle—the ancient Arimathea—is the model of one’s idea of a beautiful Syrian village—all the houses isolated and each surrounded by palm trees; the meadows and the exterior of the village covered with olive trees, or divided by rich plantations of Indian fig.... Next day, at length, after crossing a vast hill, we saw the Holy City. I will describe it to you from the Mount of Olives. This is a high hill, still partially covered with the tree which gives it its name. Jerusalem is situated upon an opposite height which descends as a steep ravine and forms, with the assistance of the Mount of Olives, the narrow valley of Jehosaphat. Jerusalem is entirely surrounded by an old feudal wall, with towers and gates of the time of the crusaders, and in perfect preservation. As the town is built upon a hill you can from the opposite height discern the roof of almost every house. In the front is the magnificent mosque built upon the site of the Temple. A variety of domes and towers rise in all directions. The houses are of bright stone. I was thunderstruck. I saw before me apparently a gorgeous city. Nothing can be conceived more wild and terrible and barren than the surrounding scenery, dark, strong, and severe; but the ground is thrown about in such picturesque undulation that the mind [being] full of the sublime, not the beautiful, rich and waving woods and sparkling cultivation would be misplaced.
JERUSALEM