Dizzy—Man and Myth

Disraeli, by Robert Blake. St. Martin’s, $12.50

The British People, being subject to fogs and possessing a powerful Middle Class, require grave statesmen,” wrote Disraeli, and perhaps provided the explanation as to why this most brilliant and flamboyant of all British parliamentary figures before Churchill—who hardly surpasses him in wit and command of language —held power with a majority for six years only, and was then swept out of office by a landslide unleashed by the fury of Gladstone’s oratory in ‘the Midlothian campaign. Indeed if _ Dizzy had died in the 1850s, he would seem now to have been as negative an influence on his country and party as Charles James Fox had been fifty years earlier. Such is the verdict of Mr. Robert Blake in his brilliant new biography of the man who, whether deliberately or accidentally, gave the modern Tory party in Britain its soul. He found the party led by a man whom he described as having “caught the “Whigs bathing and walked off with their clothes’—Peel; destroyed him with the help of Bentinck and the Land party; condemned what remained of the party to thirty years of frustrating opposition, apart from brief caretaker governments; himself led them through it to a great electoral triumph in 1874, and though defeated six years later, left the new Conservative Party the normal majority party for eighty years after his death. In the course of this career he produced some of the best political novels ever written; came to dominate as an arbiter of behavior the very London society which he had earlier scandalized as much by what Mr. Blake superbly calls his “ornate effrontery” as by his love affairs and his debts; and finally made himself a close friend and confidant to the Queen whose name is associated with those codes of behavior which Dizzy sc consistently flouted. He was a cynic and a romantic; in his own words he was “never respectable”; he had no consistent political principles beyond a deep love for Britain and a belief that her greatness rested upon “the aristocratic settlement”: he was a master of invective and when he descended to political detail it was usually to wreck an opponent’s argument. But in the end he did create, too— “create” with its artistic connotations is the right word—and he did so by inspiring in others, especially younger men, a will to search for a vision beyond the minutiae of day-to-day politics. “For the younger generation,’ Sir William Harcourt wrote to him, “you have enlarged the horizon of the possibilities of the future.” In Mr. Blake’s words: “His mind was like a Catherine wheel shooting out sparks. Most of them fell on damp earth. Every now and then one would reach the dry grass, set it ablaze, and illuminate the night.” To write the biography of such a man is a hard task indeed, especially as Dizzy’s whole life and its presentation were in many ways a conscious work of art. His defenses are seldom down, even in his private letters. Mr. Blake strips away much of the spurious mythology and shows us a Disraeli with no consistent “vision of Empire,’ no real concern with social reform or a Tory democracy—that was Lord Randolph’s concept—and whose great virtues of courage and intellect did not prevent much shadiness in his early life. But Mr. Blake, with consummate literary skill and painstaking scholarship, reveals a far more fascinating figure—Disraeli the man, not the myth. As often, the man is more interesting than the myth created around him by lesser men. At the end of this book we can only say, with Bismarck, “der alte Jude, das ist der Mann.”

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Disraeli, by Robert Blake. St. Martin’s, $12.50

The British People, being subject to fogs and possessing a powerful Middle Class, require grave statesmen,” wrote Disraeli, and perhaps provided the explanation as to why this most brilliant and flamboyant of all British parliamentary figures before Churchill—who hardly surpasses him in wit and command of language —held power with a majority for six years only, and was then swept out of office by a landslide unleashed by the fury of Gladstone’s oratory in ‘the Midlothian campaign. Indeed if _ Dizzy had died in the 1850s, he would seem now to have been as negative an influence on his country and party as Charles James Fox had been fifty years earlier. Such is the verdict of Mr. Robert Blake in his brilliant new biography of the man who, whether deliberately or accidentally, gave the modern Tory party in Britain its soul. He found the party led by a man whom he described as having “caught the “Whigs bathing and walked off with their clothes’—Peel; destroyed him with the help of Bentinck and the Land party; condemned what remained of the party to thirty years of frustrating opposition, apart from brief caretaker governments; himself led them through it to a great electoral triumph in 1874, and though defeated six years later, left the new Conservative Party the normal majority party for eighty years after his death. In the course of this career he produced some of the best political novels ever written; came to dominate as an arbiter of behavior the very London society which he had earlier scandalized as much by what Mr. Blake superbly calls his “ornate effrontery” as by his love affairs and his debts; and finally made himself a close friend and confidant to the Queen whose name is associated with those codes of behavior which Dizzy sc consistently flouted. He was a cynic and a romantic; in his own words he was “never respectable”; he had no consistent political principles beyond a deep love for Britain and a belief that her greatness rested upon “the aristocratic settlement”: he was a master of invective and when he descended to political detail it was usually to wreck an opponent’s argument. But in the end he did create, too— “create” with its artistic connotations is the right word—and he did so by inspiring in others, especially younger men, a will to search for a vision beyond the minutiae of day-to-day politics. “For the younger generation,’ Sir William Harcourt wrote to him, “you have enlarged the horizon of the possibilities of the future.” In Mr. Blake’s words: “His mind was like a Catherine wheel shooting out sparks. Most of them fell on damp earth. Every now and then one would reach the dry grass, set it ablaze, and illuminate the night.” To write the biography of such a man is a hard task indeed, especially as Dizzy’s whole life and its presentation were in many ways a conscious work of art. His defenses are seldom down, even in his private letters. Mr. Blake strips away much of the spurious mythology and shows us a Disraeli with no consistent “vision of Empire,’ no real concern with social reform or a Tory democracy—that was Lord Randolph’s concept—and whose great virtues of courage and intellect did not prevent much shadiness in his early life. But Mr. Blake, with consummate literary skill and painstaking scholarship, reveals a far more fascinating figure—Disraeli the man, not the myth. As often, the man is more interesting than the myth created around him by lesser men. At the end of this book we can only say, with Bismarck, “der alte Jude, das ist der Mann.”