Dizzy

"Dizzy"

DISRAELI: A PICTURE or THE VICTORIAN AGE--Andre Maurois--Appleton ($3).

The Man. Into the stodgiest period of English history minced "Dizzy," "in a coat of black velvet, poppy-colored trousers broidered with gold, a scarlet waistcoat, sparkling rings worn on top of white kid gloves." In decent black, Gladstone strode opposite--half-concealing his metaphysical doubts behind a truly British sense of duty. "At Oxford the young men drank less in 1840 because Gladstone had been up in 1830."

Facile Andre Maurois, biographer in the new imaginative manner, brings a foreigner's sympathy to Benjamin Disraeli, Jew, enigma, suspect; gauges his ambition, lists the obstacles, counts the defeats, shows that Disraeli learned to temper his brilliance with patience until at last, aged and broken, he attained "the top of the slippery pole" of politics.

But on the way:

He skirmished brilliantly in law (which he quitted because "to be a great lawyer I must give up my chance of being a great man"); in finance (but to the tune of debts that shadowed him most of his life); in newspaper publishing (which his speculations soon made impossible).

Utterly discouraged at twenty, he wrote a successful novel,--a practice which he followed periodically after each disappointment, analyzing the causes of his failures, and mapping out a new program.

"The entrance to Parliament lay through the drawing rooms." Dizzy saw to it he became the fashion. "It turned out I had a very fine leg, which I never knew before." So sought after was he, so gay and dandified, that benign Lord Melbourne was moved to inquire: "Well now, tell me,what do you want to be?"--"I want to be Prime Minister."--"No, no," Lord Melbourne replied with a sigh: "No, no."

Repeatedly defeated at the polls, Disraeli finally turned Tory, and slipped into Parliament through the influence of one of his many women friends. His too brilliant maiden speech was booed. But an Irish opponent, impressed, advised him: "Get rid of your genius for a session. . . . The House will not allow a man to be a wit and an orator, unless they have the credit of finding it out." He gave them the opportunity.

Friends staked their "Dis" to a country manor, terraced. "My dear lady, you cannot have a terrace without peacocks!"--this to his adored wife, whom Author Maurois variously records as 15, 12, 14 years his senior. Affectionate, loyal, her garrulous naivete was the joke of London. In a conversation about Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) she asked his address to invite him to dinner. But her cultured husband remembered: "She believed in me when men despised me:"

At last Disraeli overturned Peel, and served in Lord Derby's new Cabinet. But when the Duke of Wellington, very old, very deaf, had the new list of Ministers read to him, he kept interrupting: "Who? Who?" whereupon they became known as the "Who? Who? Cabinet"; and were soon overthrown, Gladstone triumphant.

Dizzy, biding his time, seemed to relish the dramatic effect of himself set up against the ponderous Gladstone. "One day Gladstone stood in his place on the Treasury Bench, imposing and thunderous, hurtling upon his rival epithets that became ever more violent. As each of these fell, Disraeli lowered his head a little further. He seemed to be literally crushed by the terrific hammering of Gladstone's voice. At last he ended, with such a smashing blow on the broad table between them that pens and papers flew in disorder. He sat down. For a moment the House, silent and motionless, wondered whether Dizzy would be able to raise his head. Then the prostrated figure was seen slowly coming back to life, first the head, then the shoulders. At last Disraeli rose, and said, in a voice so low as could barely be heard: 'The Right Honorable gentleman has spoken with much passion, much eloquence, and much--ahem--violence. (A pause--a long pause.) But the damage can be repaired.'" And painfully he bent over, gathered up one by one the objects scattered by the fiery Gladstone, methodically ranged them in their accustomed places on the sacred table, looked complacently at this restored orderliness, and then, in his finest voice, replied.

Sixty was painfully past, when luck turned. Peel he had overthrown unpleasantly by castigation, and was unpopular for it; Gladstone he now defeated gaily by playing more liberal than his Liberal opponent, and was applauded enthusiastically. Victoria welcomed her new Prime Minister with delight. Asked the secret of his success with the Queen, he replied: "I never refuse; I never contradict; I sometimes forget." From Osborne, she sent him primroses.

In 1875 Disraeli discovered that the majority stock in Suez Canal (France and Germany competing) could be had for some four million pounds. Such a sum had to be voted by Parliament. But Parliament was not in session. "The thing must be done," wrote Disraeli to the Queen, and sent a request to a great banker. "Rothschild was eating grapes. He took one, spat out the skin, and said: 'What is your security?'--'The British Government'--'You shall have it.'" The Faery, as Dizzy called the Queen, was the more overjoyed at "the thought of Bismarck's fury, for only shortly before, he had insolently declared that England had ceased to be a political force."

Appeared "the Russian menace to India." Disraeli threatened war, gained Cyprus for Britain, juggled deft political intrigue at the Congress of Berlin, returned to a veritable triumph in London: "We have brought you back, I think, Peace with Honor."

Then bad luck again--trouble with Afghans and Zulus--and Gladstone.

So he wrote another novel, glided charmingly through his last days, ruminating the bitterness of Power. But his had been, as the young Dizzy had intended, "a continued grand procession from manhood to the tomb."

"His grateful sovereign and friend, Victoria R. I.," sent primroses to his grave. Gladstone refused to believe these had indeed been his favorite flower.

The Significance. It has been said, you cannot write of Disraeli without blowing upon Gladstone, nor of Gladstone without decrying Disraeli. Disraeli, a character to excite the imagination, has excited his fair share of disparagement. Gladstone biographers blame him for delaying and hindering the work of their hero, rate him as the monster rather than the ornament of the Victorian Age. Froude, time-honored authority, belittles him, insists sweepingly he solved no political problem at home or abroad. Laymen credit him with a general impression of glitter, conceit, trickiness, and the somehow illicit purchase of the Suez Canal. His own biographers have pleaded his cause, themselves confused as to his enigmatic character.

The present biographer offers no startling new information, but arranges the old in so graceful and, more important, so entertaining a pattern that the reader is charmed, and dares not remember that Gladstone was after all the Great Liberal Leader who accomplished notable reforms in England. The French have always scorned what they consider Anglo-Saxon cant: Maurois reproaches Gladstone "not so much for always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve as for claiming that God had put it there." But Dizzy's trumps are of his own naming: for himself, no knave, "British Premier;" for the Queen, "Empress of India."

The Author dreamt of becoming professor of philosophy; actually followed the family tradition of manufacturing textiles. Familiar with the English language, he was, during the war, attached to the staff of a British general, as liaison officer, and wrote at that time Les Silences du Colonel Bramble. After the war he is said to have devoted three days a week to business, three to literature, time enough, however, to produce Ariel, popularly acclaimed fanciful biography of Shelley. Maurois now pays his first visit to this country, lecturing on "The Newest French Literature," "The Poetry of the Movies."