a letter from Byron to D'Israeli mentioning his subsequently destroyed autobiography--



TO ISAAC DISRAELI Montenero, Villa Dupuy, near Leghorn, June 10th 1822

(to ye care of John Murray, Esquire)

Dear Sir, - If you will permit me to call you so. I had some time ago taken up my pen at Pisa to thank you for the present of your new Edition of the Literary Character, which has often been to me a consolation, and always a pleasure. I was interrupted, however, partly by business, and partly by vexations of different kinds, for I have not very long ago lost a child by a fever, and I have had a good deal of petty trouble with the laws of this lawless country, on account of the prosecution of a servant for an attack upon a cowardly Scoundrel of a dragoon, who drew his Sword upon some unarmed Englishmen; and whom I had done the honour to mistake for an officer, and to treat like a Gentleman . . .

But to return to things more analogous to the Literary Character. I wish to say that had I known that the book was to fall into your hands, or that the MSS. notes you have thought worthy of publication would have attracted your attention, I would have made them more copious and perhaps not so careless. I really cannot know whether I am or am not the Genius you are pleased to call me, but I am very willing to put up with the mistake, if it be one. It is a title dearly enough bought by most men, to render it endurable, even when not quite clearly made out, which it never can be till the Posterity, whose decisions are merely dreams to ourselves, has sanctioned or denied it, while it can touch us no further.

Mr Murray is in possession of an MSS. Memoir of mine (not to be published till I am in my grave) which, strange as it may seem, I never read over since it was written and have no desire to read over again. In it I have told what, as far as I know, is the truth - not the whole truth - for if I had done so I must have involved much private and some dissipated history; but, nevertheless, nothing but the truth, as far as regard for others permitted it to appear.

I do not know whether you have seen those MSS.; but as you are curious in such things as relate to the human mind, I should feel gratified if you had . . .

If there are any questions which you would like to ask me as connected with your Philosophy of the literary Mind (if mine be a literary mind), I will answer them fairly or give a reason for not - good, bad, or indifferent. At present I am paying the penalty of having helped to spoil the public taste, for, as long as I wrote in the false exaggerated style of youth and the times in which we live, they applauded me to the very echo; and within these few years, when I have endeavoured at better things, and written what I suspect to have the principle of duration in it, the Church, the Chancellor, and all men - even to my grand patron Francis Jeffrey Esquire of the E[dinburgh] R[eview] - have risen up against me and my later publications. Such is Truth! Men dare not look her in the face, except by degrees: they mistake her for a Gorgon, instead of knowing her to be a Minerva.

I do not mean to apply this mythological simile to my own endeavours. I have only to turn over a few pages of your volumes to find innumerable and far more illustrious instances.

It is lucky that I am of a temper not to be easily turned aside though by no means difficult to irritate. But I am making a dissertation instead of writing a letter. I write to you from the Villa Dupuy, near Leghorn, with the islands of Elba and Corsica visible from my balcony, and my old friend the Mediterranean rolling blue at my feet. As long as I retain my feeling and my passion for Nature, I can partly soften or subdue my other passions and resist or endure those of others.

I have the honour to be, truly, your obliged and faithful Servant,
NOEL BYRON