BOOKS
The Third Nation
By RONALD BRYDEN
FROM Trollope's runically-titled shelf, the greatest Victorian political novel of all is missing: How Did He Do It? He never told how, 'Mr. Danbeny'—his caricature of Disraeli— rose to power. 'After all, what counts,' con- cluded the American with whom I was recently comparing anti-Semitisms, 'is that in Britain you could have a Jewish prime minister.' Do you really think so?' I asked incredulously. 'Who?' and then realised what he was talking about. A hundred years later, Disraeli seems more im- plausible than ever. Is it really possible that in' the blaze of John Bull's noonday, in the age of Punch jokes, Oxford panics and Oliver Twist, a long-nosed, ringleted Sephardi not only governed England, but rode the crest of national self- assertion? The monumental biographies tell nothing, for they start from confident hindsight. They cannot relive the doubts, retreats and tiny advances; cannot weigh the balance of con- tempt and tolerance in all the tones of voice, curls of lip and angles of eyebrow which some- how added up to his acceptance. What we need is the whole ambiguous, infinitely shaded social picture which only a novel can give. For a fact so strange and complex as Disraeli's success the only adequate explanation is fiction. Only fiction can re-create the arrant, fantastic improbability from which it started.
Pretend Disraeli never lived, and try to work out, from circumstance and precedent, the chances open to a Jew living in Victorian Eng- land. For, to begin with, the Jewish community until the 1830s were legally foreigners resident in this country. Cromwell had allowed a few hundred refugees from the Spanish and Portu- guese Counter-Reformations to take sanctuary in London. Charles It casually let them stay, and by 1800 there were 20,000 in the capital. But never in all that time was there a law per- mitting Jews to own land or become British subjects—a naturalisation Bill passed in the 1750s had to be repealed after violent popular rioting. The patriarchs of the great Sephardic families—Henriqueses, Lindos, Lousadas, Mendes da Costas—lived to themselves around their graceful synagogue in Bevis Marks, speak- ing of their "nation,' refusing intermarriage, conducting congregational business in Portu- guese. They were aliens, tolerated for their uses: their languages, their medical skills learned in Cordova and Morocco, their connections in Antwerp, Leghorn, the West Indies and the gem and bullion markets of Amsterdam. They kept on the right side of the city fathers with yearly gifts of plate, and strictly forbade proselytising the natives or betting with them about possible disasters to British arms or governments. By discretion and utility, they could grow rich, and several did. But the powers, the rights and honours of the State—its membership, public offices, courts and universities—were barred by the simple requirement, aimed at Catholics, of a Church of England oath of loyalty.
Of course there were loopholes. Money made several. At a price, you could by-pass Parlia- ment and obtain a direct royal grant of 'denizen- ship,' entitling you to trade as an Englishman. For a thousand guineas, you could buy one of the dozen broking licences open to Jews upon the Stock Exchange. Solomon Medina, who helped Marlborough fiddle army stores, achieved a knighthood before they were both disgraced. Sampson Gideon, who financed the crushing of the Forty-five, won a baronetcy, not for himself but for his son. There was intellect : a' Jew could not become a BA, but several were Fellows of the Royal Society. There was the bedchamber : Laura Norsa, the Drury Lane beauty, married Walpole's son and obtained a duke for her daughter (a loophole stopped promptly and peevishly by George Ill's Royal Marriages Act). And, of course, you could relinquish your religion. Either you took the oath which opened the door to the armed forces and public service (a Schomberg captained a man-of-war at Quebec, Ricardo sat in Parliament). Or you could enter the eighteenth-century freemasonry of scepticism and scholarship: still a private individual, still a 'foreigner,' but equal in opportunity at least with the middle-class nonconformists thrusting their provincial talents forward in contest with the Anglican establishment of birth. This was the road chosen by Isaac d'Israeli.
In a way, it is astonishing to consider how much of the groundwork he had laid for his sons, Ben, Ralph and Jem. Withdrawing from Bevis Marks, he had penetrated far enough into English life to reach dining terms with his pro- fessional Bloomsbury neighbours, membership of the Atheneum and an honorary Oxford degree. He bought a country house in Bucking- hamshire and cultivated the sheepish, rosy countenance of a village vicar. His children were reared to worship as Anglicans and call him 'the Governor.' He achieved Englishness for them, and respectability. The only disabilities left in their way were lack of money and influence. The irony of Disraeli's story is that to conquer these last two disadvantages, he threw his father's gains, respectability and Englishness, to the winds.
How he did so makes the two rather unedify- ing stories unfolded for the first time in Mr. Jerman's book : 'a study,' as he says, 'of the old wire-puller as a young bungler.'* On the whole, Mr. Jerman skips with flattering American un- awareness over the whole problem of being Jewish in England a century ago—his grasp of English social nuance is in general somewhat
* THE YOUNG DISRAELI. By B. R. Jerman. (0.U.P., 35s.) loose. His closest approach to exploring the losi nineteenth-century continuum in which Disraeli needs explaining is to cull weather reports fret old Times files (we learn that the winter stools which brought on Disraeli's final illness Ms.° submerged the Black Sea port of Poti). But In default of the great panorama a Trollope °r George Eliot might have constructed, he has uncovered some relevant and surprising faets,; Since they have been shirked or skirted by a" previous English biographers, we should not be ungrateful.
Essentially, his book is a report on two finds of letters from the British Museum and Hughen. den: Disraeli's correspondence with his neigh' bours the Austens, and with Lady Henriett? Sykes. Benjamin Austen, a solicitor of GraY s Inn, lived around the corner from Russell Square with his childless, self-educated wife Sara. They adopted Ben as affectionate literal patrons: middle-class sparrows eager to hatch. a phcenix. It was Sara who enthusiastically coPied out Vivian Grey in her own hand to preserve the nineteen-year-old author's youthful anonyfillt,Y' And it was Austen who, on the strength of tne novel's promise, lent him the money whie.n launched him on his way. Precisely how large 11,0 loan was is not clear. It enabled Ben to travel ni, 1829 to Spain, Greece, Turkey, Palestine a.uu Egypt, and return to set up as London's gaudiest bachelor, peer of d'Orsay and Bulwer, gorgeous in chains, notorious in waist-coats. ('Why many chains, Dizzy?' Bulwer inquired. 'Are Pat practising to be Lord Mayor?) Certainly, 114 obligation mounted, the phcenix seemed in°r6 likely to turn out a cuckoo. It was years befo,rhe the whole debt was repaid: years in whi°,",, Disraeli's visits to Sara's salon grew slighting rarer, Austen's letters more wounded, frequent and insistent. In the end they had to give him uP for spoiled. Sara consoled herself for a time 11 nursing the promise of a .young nephew, Heil Layard, but he proved disappointing and ha, to be sent East. Nothing in his character indicate that he would discover Nineveh there.
Disraeli's road to influence was even mcire dubious. If the rumours Mr. Jerman exhumes are to be credited, he attained it by sharing a mistress with a Lord Chancellor. Henrietta Sykes (her 1101.ii trait shows a good-natured young creature shaPe,, like a small Victorian sofa) was the fashionalu` wife of an unfaithful baronet who, in return 1431; her complaisance, did not inquire into her rela tions with the eminent Tory, Lord Lyndhurst, 110r the rising Tory Radical pamphleteer. But when found the painter Maclise in her bed, he Pnuti lished the fact in the morning Papers. 130t1 Disraeli and Lyndhurst dropped her sharply buit continued in amicable political partnership.,,'. was Lyndhurst who put Disraeli up for MO stone, beside the Welsh ironmaster Wyndhoni Lewis, whose fading, talkative widow he was 11(1 marry. Mary Anne Wyndham Lewis brought a, the money and influence Disraeli needed. But la; problem remains. It was not merely his father,. son he made Britain swallow, nor Lord LYnu.,
hurst's protégé, but a flamboyantly alien creatid" of his own. In the Romantic faith that a nil
may make himself larger than life, Disrae, flaunted his ringlets, his exoticism, an inventea. Jewish charisma, to build a theatrical ifilag`i which seems today the first triumph of the age.° publicity, charlatanism and TV personalities; How did he do it? Was it by fastening on tn,, English the same Romantic dream that they eo0. be greater than themselves? Was persuadig them into a century of empire the way he fins got them to accept the foreign peacock vib needed India for a tail?
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