Books: Tory Story

DIZZY (310 pp.)—Hesketh Pearson—Harper ($4).

A hundred years ago, everyone took for granted that the Tories were a conservative party, the Whigs a liberal one. So when Tory Benjamin Disraeli pushed through Parliament the liberal Reform Bill of 1867 (doubling the electorate), both Whig and Tory rank & file were as stunned as if night had turned into day. Tory Leader Lord Derby had to dash about explaining the significance of this extraordinary stroke to his amazed followers. “Don’t you see,” he cried delightedly, “how we have dished the Whigs?”

Subsequently, dishing the Whigs (or as Disraeli put it: “Tory men and Whig measures”) has been a basic plank in Tory platforms. Even Britain’s Hesketh Pearson relishes nothing more than the tart flavor of a well-dished Whig—and Pearson denies that he is a Tory at all. In his time, he has written sympathetic biographies of such diverse spirits as Dickens, G.B.S., Oscar Wilde and Gilbert & Sullivan. But, Tory or no Tory, Biographer Pearson seems to see eye-to-eye with Dizzy on a great many matters of principle. He is strongly opposed, for one thing, to compulsory education beyond the three R’s. For another, he is able to write of William Ewart Gladstone as venomously as if that formidable old gentleman were still active in politics. In short, if Pearson is not quite the best man to write a cool, critical study of Dizzy, he is admirably equipped to write a sympathetic, and enthusiastic one.

Purple Passage. Dizzy’s motto was

Forti nihil difficile. This was translated by him literally as: “Nothing is difficult to the brave”—and by the Whigs as: “The impudence of some men sticks at nothing.” Even the Tories wondered what they had gotten hold of when “that damned bumptious Jew boy” invaded their circles “in a black velvet coat lined with satin, purple trousers with a gold band . . . scarlet waistcoat, long lace ruffles . . . white gloves with jeweled rings outside them . . . well-oiled black ringlets touching his shoulders.”

“Well now, tell me,” bluff Lord Melbourne asked this exotic phenomenon, “what do you want to be?” To which

Dizzy replied, with the frankness of a saint: “I want to be Prime Minister.”

To help himself up the long climb Dizzy married a society widow for her money. “An excellent creature,” he said of her, “but she can never remember which came first, the Greeks or the Romans.” He came to love her so devotedly that he once paid her a supreme compliment: “Why, my dear, you are more like a mistress than a wife.” She said of him: “Dizzy has the most wonderful moral courage, but no physical courage. When he has his shower bath, I always have to pull the string.”

Throughout his career Dizzy wrote novels. In those days, novel writing was not considered the respectable, sedentary occupation it has become today: in a politician it seemed to suggest a temperament highly mercurial and unstatesmanlike as compared, for instance, with that of Lord Derby, who once refused to discuss the progress of the Crimean War because he “was translating Homer and did not wish to talk politics.” Moreover,

Dizzy’s novels were as outrageously colorful as his clothes, and packed to bursting with aphorisms that most Tories agreed with but would never think of saying out loud:

¶”A want of tact is worse than a want of virtue.”

¶”As men advance in life, all passions resolve themselves into money.”

¶”Sensible men are all of the same religion.” (“And pray what is that?”) “Sensible men never tell.”

“I Candidly Acknowledge.” Dizzy could be equally direct in his public life. He told his constituents: “There is no doubt, gentlemen, that all men who offer themselves as candidates for public favor have motives of some sort. I candidly acknowledge that I have, and I will tell you what they are: I love fame; I love public reputation; I love to live in the eyes of the country; and it is a glorious thing for a man to do who has had my difficulties to contend against.”

Author Pearson likes to believe that such a frankness characterized all Disraeli’s acts. Once Dizzy privately remarked that a show of British paintings was “destitute … of all spirituality, all ideality”—then made an after-dinner speech declaring that he had been “most forcibly struck [by] the high tone of spirituality and ideality” of the paintings. Concludes Pearson: “He clearly felt that he had better say the exact opposite of what he considered quite obvious, in the hope that intelligent people would appreciate the irony.” This explanation suggests, in Author Pearson, a lack of appreciation both of the elements of irony and the demands of politics. Dizzy had no such lack. When a Tory snooper collected evidence of an illicit love affair involving Whig Lord Palmerston, and wanted to expose it at the next election, Dizzy sensibly demurred. “Palmerston is now 70,” he said. “If he could provide evidence of his potency . . . he’d sweep the country.”

It is hard to sum up a man who voted against his own party whenever he thought fit, and yet (as Pearson sadly admits) bequeathed to politics the tight “party-line” system that has plagued it ever since. No man did more than Dizzy to din radical notions into Tory skulls, yet he could also say without a qualm that “the movement of the middle classes for the abolition of slavery was virtuous, but it was not wise.”

In his harmonizing of such mixed ideas lies Disraeli’s fascination. Author Pearson, offering no startling new discoveries of his own but gleaning gracefully through the biographical harvest of more plodding predecessors, has written one of the most readable sketches of the year.