Vol. 34 No. 1 1967 - page 132

132
GEORGE LICHTHEIM
THE ILLUSIONIST
DISRAELI. By Robert Bloke. Eyre
&
Spottiswode. £4 lOs.
Having in the past miraculously breathed some life into the
dry bones of Bonar Law, Britain's dullest and least significant Prime
Minister, Mr. Robert Blake, the Oxford historian, has now turned to the
very different figure of Benjamin Disraeli. From his patient labors in the
archives there has emerged a splendid portrait of the enigmatic character
who presided for almost four decades over the Tory half of Victorian
politics and letters. In the process he has destroyed a few legends and
unearthed a good deal of circumstantial detail not recorded by DisraeIi's
official biographers, the worthy if long-winded pair of Monypenny and
Buckle. Yet the reviewers who predictably pounced on the scandalous side
of the record-Disraeli's bizarre journalistic exploits in the eighteen thir–
ties, his debts, his quarrels, his weird entanglement with Henrietta Sykes,
his invention of an aristocratic background for his own highly respectable
bourgeois family-have cantered off in the wrong direction. Mr. Blake
is no Lytton Strachey and not interested in scandal. Not only is he a
professional historian and a careful scholar: his assessment of DisraeIi's
baffling character is based on a profound understanding of the environ–
ment which made him possible. The central fact about Disraeli-missed
by earlier biographers and firmly established by Mr. Blake-is that he
was an adherent of the Romantic movement which climaxed in the
eighteen thirties and collapsed two decades later. His early fame as a
novelist, an amateur parliamentarian with a few brilliant speeches to his
credit, and the central figure of the "Young England" group of aristo–
cratic Toryism was won in the eighteen forties, when it was still possible
for an aspiring politician to imitate Byron. To this period belong his amor–
ous adventures, which gave offense to the respectable, and his financial
speculations, which left him permanently debt-ridden. Then, by an ex–
traordinary stroke of luck aided by some rapid maneuvering, he made
the transition from Byronic adventurism to Victorian solemnity at the
very last moment before the train pulled out of the station. The great
economic gearshift of the eighteen fifties had enthroned the middle class
and wrecked the kind of aristocratic Toryism in which Disraeli believed.
He survived the transition, as he survived all subsequent ones, by exploit–
ing to the full his intellectual ascendancy over the bewildered cohorts
1...,122,123,124,125,126,127,128,129,130,131 133,134,135,136,137,138,139,140,141,142,...164
Powered by FlippingBook