Gladstone v. Disraeli

NON-FICTION

A Cross Section. Look 50 years ago, to 1876. Disraeli is 72. Gladstone is 67. Both have been in politics a full generation -Tory Disraeli almost always "out" [of power] and until recently detested by most of the members of his own party, which can find no better man to lead it; Gladstone, "in and out," half-in, half-out, goaded around the arena by a conscience, the subtlety of which he is interminably explaining to the misapprehensive gentlemen of England.

Disraeli's face has assumed its immortal cast. The gaudy affectations of his bewildering youth he has exchanged for arresting excellence. He has five years to live, gout-racked, glory-laden.

Gladstone's square face is still combative. He is healthy. He fells trees. It will be at least ten years before his portrait, majestic, infinitely venerable, will be painted for the ages. It will be 22 years before he dies.

In spirit, Disraeli is -it could not be otherwise -the younger. Kittenishly and desperately he is in love with two grandmothers. Reeking with atrocious romance he will write yet another novel, while perhaps Gladstone's chief private speculation is whether he ought not even now to retire from politics and serve God as a bishop. . . .

Thus were the two leaders when the greatest of all Parliaments was at its greatest. His body breaking up, Disraeli in this year of 1876 left the Commons for the milder House of Lords, becoming the Earl of Beaconsfield. But he still retained the leadership of his party and was prime minister (1874-80) -his one spell of real unchallenged power. He had begun this reign by getting the Suez Canal -with Rothschild's help. "Madame, you have it," he scribbled to the Queen.

He was ready to get and do many other things, when the Balkans broke open. He believed that Gladstone's previous premiership had lowered British prestige. Bismarck had become Europe's autocrat. So when Bismarck seemed to take control of Balkan affairs against Turkey, it touched the Imperial pride and anti-Gladstonianism of Disraeli, who promptly told Bismarck, "No!" Thus, despite Gladstonian moralizing, Disraeli went to Berlin in 1878, dictated a Treaty which left Turkey a little territory and Britain all the glory. Glorious indeed was the day when Bismarck summarized Europe by saying: "Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann!"

Returning to London, "der alte Jude" tish-toshed with the Queen, billet-douxed his grandmothers-in-love, plunged into affairs with Egypt, Afghanistan, South Africa. But death, defeat and Gladstone were upon him. In the elections in 1880, Gladstone introduced stump oratory to British democracy. Through his campaign in the constituency of Midlothian he appealed to the country. Economy for those at home, freedom for oppressed nations abroad-finance and Christian idealism -these were his two topics. In the battle of Midlothian, he temporarily buried Disraeli's glory under an unprecedented Liberal victory. "Nothing more than trouble and trial await me," said the Queen. He came back to power -not the old Gladstone of Christ Church, Oxford, but the new Gladstone; who, little as he could have dreamed it, was the forerunner of the pre-War Lloyd George, Liberal demagog.

For the next 14 years, two-thirds of England forgot the dead Disraeli, worshiped the lofty Gladstone. The Liberal party needed but one argument: Gladstone. Oppressed people had one hope: Gladstone. Tory dukes concentrated their curses on one: Gladstone.

One winter evening not long before the 20th Century, a friend came to Harwarden. Gladstone was resting upstairs, and Mrs. Gladstone served tea. The conversation turning on some serious question, the friend desiring to appear pious said: "Well, these are very serious times. But we know that there is One Above who takes care of us all." "Yes," replied Mrs. Gladstone, "he'll be right down."

Significance. Disraeli and Gladstone -both were remote. Disraeli, artist and Jew, seemed always a foreigner. Gladstone, Olympian Christian, had, said one, "the mind of a 13th Century schoolman." One seemed to come from another clime, one from another time. They both ruled the hard-headed men of England for two generations. Both were clearly patterned in the weave, not only of England, but also of the modern world. Fortunately two of the world's greatest biographies record their lives-Lord Morley on Gladstone, Moneypenny and Buckle on Disraeli.

Mr. Somerville has now contrived a "harmony" of the two men's lives, the two biographies. From boyhood to death, from literary lapses to entangling alliances, Mr. Somerville has got in all the essentials of character and circumstance. It is a masterpiece of condensation. It is a brilliant synthesis and, inescapably, a dramatic piece of political philosophy.

Whence Progress

OUR TIMES: THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, 1900-1904 -Mark Sullivan-Scribner's ($5). Here is a book that brings back yesterday-recalls with vividness what our world was, not ages ago, but in the daybreak of today. It is a history of the life and times of the average citizen a quarter century ago, his politics, his fashions in clothes, his advertisements, his economic problems, his popular songs, his heroes and his leaders, his jokes, his prophecies pathetic and otherwise, his medicine and his science, his art, his music and his literature. A unique savor is lent to the whole by more than 200 illustrations: cartoons of issues that were, plates of fashions that were, photographs of yesterday's political leaders as they were, and of today's political leaders as they then were, pictures of the stage as it was, scores of popular songs now forgotten -or almost so. To anyone over 35 it will bring a renewed sense' of the progress he has forgotten, of the things for which he lived in days only a little gone by -a feeling at once poignant and a bit sad to see how completely yesterday has vanished.

Today and Tomorrow

LYCURGUS OR THE FUTURE OF LAW -E. S. P. Haynes -Dutton ($1).

PYGMALION OR THE DOCTOR OF THE FUTURE -R. M. Wilson, M. B., Ch. B. -Dutton ($1).

THRASYMACHUS OR THE FUTURE OF MORALS -C. E. M. Joad -Dutton ($1).

OUROBOROS OR THE MECHANICAL EXTENSION OF MANKIND -Garet Garrett -Dutton ($1).

The "Today and Tomorrow Series" continues to increase and multiply. It cannot be said that it is maintaining the standard of excellence set by its first few volumes. Since Haldane's Baedalus, Russell's replying Icarus and Crookshank's Mongol in Our Midst, many of the little red books have enjoyed prestige that was largely borrowed. Bertrand Russell wrote a second book (What I Believe), as did Dr. Crookshank (Aesculapius) that stood on independent merits. The feminist controversy between Mrs. Russell and Captain Ludovici (Hypatia v. Lysistrata) was very readable, though biased on both sides. Gerald Heard's Narcissus -An Anatomy of Clothes qualified in its own right. But for the most part it seems as if the Duttons have gone unwisely far afield for writers and subjects, thinning out a superb vintage with hasty and insipid dilutions.

The four additions to the series here listed illustrate this decline. Only one of the four, Ouroboros, is of compelling interest and originality. In Lycurgus, Mr. Haynes endeavors to write for the laity but waxes excessively technical and seldom escapes his insular British point of view. His style is unrelieved by the figures and crispness that have become part of the "Today and Tomorrow" tradition. He moves solemnly through a thicket of statutory references to the conclusions, neither of them unique, that society needs to simplify and codify its laws, that individual liberty is vanishing in the face of collectivist economic movements.

In Pygmalion, Dr. Wilson is at great pains to have us distinguish between a symptom of disease and an effect or result of disease. He heralds the return of the general practitioner to study a sick man in the light of his whole environment, to assign to specialists their particular duties in the case.

In Thrasymachus, Mr. Joad deals with morals after the fashion of one salvaging a sunken ship. Only yardarms of convention rise above the water, but when Mr. Joad has raised the hull he exhibits how absurdly the masts are set in the vessel's keel, how outlandish is the gear and rigging fashioned haphazard by ancient social navigators. He is very scornful indeed of "that part of human nature which expresses itself in what is called morality," but vitiates his discussion by the employment of flippant paradox, unrepresentative facts and overstrained, somewhat splenetic deductions. For example, this very affecting statement: "The objects [not the 'tendencies'] of American civilization are to substitute cleanliness for beauty, mechanism for men and hypocrisy for morals."

Mr. Garrett's Ouroboros has the merits of a central idea, an impersonal viewpoint, a cool wit. He traces the growth of machinery from Adam's pastoral day to our pasteurized one, when it has become an essential of our existence, an "extension" of human nature with which humanity will have to harmonize itself or starve.

FICTION

Suzanne's

THE LOVE GAME -Suzanne Lenglen -Adelphi ($2). Let tongues come out of cheeks and scoffing stifle. As novels go, Suzanne's is no ace, but she has not committed a footfault. No just judge may accuse her of overstepping her knowledge. Her heroine, une jeune fille bien levee, wants to be world tennis champion. Circumstances make it necessary for her to turn professional. She has English suitors. She becomes involved with an Argentine. She gambles at Monte Carlo. Her love affairs are complicated by a code of honor more British than Gallic, and solved by tactics allegedly American -but what shrewd Frenchwoman is ignorant of these? Some of the tennis scenes are a bit stodgy and childish, coming from a temperamental cosmopolite, but a big trente-et-quarante act redeems them. In fine, there is a thick sprinkling of evidence that within a certain bright bandeau is a head whose clarity has not been greatly affected by occasional, more or less comprehensible, enlargements.

Fatal Figments

BITTERN POINT -Virginia Macfadyen-A. & C. Boni ($2). We have but two fitful glimpses of the piratical, tongueless Turk of these pages. Both occur in a swamper's hut in the 18th Century Carolinas. We infer that he is shy a finger on his strangling hand, that his dagger has a permanent wave and that his ministrations upon the persons of five young women derive from Jack the Ripper. We infer, that is all. Yet that is ample to earn this Turk several graduate and honorary degrees in murdery. From the barest hints he becomes a lurking presence whose actuality Mr. Houdini could scarce disparage. He and his dirty crew begin ostensibly as figments in the imagination of a marriageable young Connecticut authoress of our time. Then they make it clear that as she has conceived, so shall she bear. No fair telling the end, shocking though it is; Miss Macfadyen has devised with restraint worthy of emulation. She handles substance as deftly as shadow and abides by Rule 1 for horror-writers -"The brighter the sun, the blacker the shade."

Tinsel

TINSEL -Charles Hanson Towne -Appleton ($2). Author Towne has been moved to chronicle a Midland social climber; how she scrambled as high as Newport and Palm Beach, barked her plump shins and returned at last to the shade of the family awning factory in Eureka. Her son, daughter and husband suffered in kind. The idea was to make it a gently humorous tale, and the Eureka Independence Day tableau starts things off well -Delia Nesbit, the awning queen, as Miss Columbia, and other Eureka dames assigned states according to social pedigree. But too many of the author's other ideas date from when they fought with spears, and he read about his characters in some book. He has been seen in better lights as versifier (The Quiet Singer, Manhattan, Beyond the Stars), as librettist and as sometime editor of The Designer, The Smart Set and McClure's.