"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.