LIFE OF THE PARTY.

When Lytton Strachey's "Eminent Victorians" was published, in 1918, it included, in addition to the portraits of his leading characters, cameos of almost all the other famous Victorians: Cardinal Newman is alongside Cardinal Manning in Manning's chapter; Gladstone is glimpsed in the chapter on General Gordon; and Lord Palmerston is visible, grimacing, behind Florence Nightingale. The only Victorian of eminence missing in the ironic gallery is the most ironic of them all, Benjamin Disraeli: man of fashion, satiric novelist, twice Prime Minister, and the dominant figure of the Conservative Party in Britain from 1846 until his death, in 1881.

The reason for leaving him out is plain: Strachey's figures, large and small, are invariably studies in that sanctimonious hypocrisy which Strachey imagined to be the keynote of the period. And of all the things that Disraeli was--mocker and opportunist, hired gun and flatterer, gadfly and courtier--the one thing that no one could ever call him was sanctimonious and hypocritical. Disraeli is Milton's Satan set loose in Tennyson's rookery, the energy principle that helps keep the landscape around him from being merely pious. Though cast as a conservative, he was at heart a romantic adventurer, in the line that stretches from Byron to D'Annunzio, a political dreamer who was also, uniquely among such dreamers, a skilled manager of men. His verve, along with what he called his "sense of the ridiculous," makes the six-volume biography of him by his admirers Monypenny and Buckle (completed in 1920) one of the most entertaining biographies in English. Robert Blake wrote a much read biography in the nineteen-sixties, and now Christopher Hibbert, the veteran English popular historian, has published a new life, "Disraeli: The Victorian Dandy Who Became Prime Minister" (Palgrave; $29.95), joined, in Britain, anyway, by William Kuhn's "The Politics of Pleasure: A Portrait of Benjamin Disraeli" (Free Press; [pounds sterling]20).

One reason that Disraeli is such an appealing subject is that, unlike other romantic adventurers, he had a successful career and a happy life. Things worked out pretty much as he had planned, even though the plan was one of the most improbable ever devised by the mind of man: a debt-scarred, overdressed, effeminate, literary Jew set himself to become Prime Minister of England, and the leader of its right-wing party, at the height of the British Empire. He is himself proof, in slightly comic form, of the principle of heroic imagination that he fabulized so passionately in his fiction. Any responsible historian can see that Disraeli couldn't have happened. But he did.

Disraeli, who was born in London in 1804, had taken Hebrew lessons as a boy, but he underwent baptism, not bar mitzvah, in his thirteenth year. His father, Isaac, an amateur scholar, a well-known miscellaneous essayist, and an uncontentious freethinker, would have been happy for his children to be mere nonbelievers; he baptized them in an offhand moment, after a dispute with his synagogue. The brilliant young Benjamin quickly discovered a loophole in the religion of his countrymen and new fellow-religionists that he eventually drove regiments' worth of ideas through: they seemed to despise a race that their own Holy Scripture taught them to revere, which meant that they weren't hateful, just confused.

He bounced in and out of second-rate schools, and got most of his education at home--enough Latin to be a decent Latinist and enough Greek to pretend. He loved to read poetry. His father had been a minor member of Byron's circle, and the young Disraeli idolized Byron to a degree exceptional even in that Byron-worshipping age. In 1826, he went off to the Continent on a grand tour on which he found and befriended Byron's old boatman. The idea of Byron then meant "Childe Harold" more than "Don Juan"--not the adventurer on a quest but the wounded young man with a sorrow.

This self-image hardly suited Disraeli's temperament, and he did what would-be Byronic heroes without the means to swim the Hellespont or fight for Greece have always done: he became a dandy. Dandyism is domesticated Byronism: the adventure begins at the waistcoat and ends at the spats. Descriptions of the young Disraeli make him sound like a cross between Cecil Beaton and a member of the Village People; on holiday in Malta, he dressed in full pirate regalia, complete with pistols ...