The Rise of M. Blum

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 256, 25 July 1936, Page 18

The Rise of M. Blum

TO meet Leon Blum you would certainly not say he was a politician, and least of all a Socialist politician. There is nothing violent about him, and the passion which one can imagine to exist, behind his nervous alertness must, you would think, be something exalted rather than overpowering, says a writer in the London “Observer.” He does not dominate. He makes no apparent attempt Io impose; himself. His obvious anxiety is to please. His interest seems to be to understand. You would say an artist, a man of letters, a dialectician, a dilettante: and you would bo right, for he is all these. Before Leon Blum entered politics as*fhe principal private secretary of the Socialist leader, Marcel Sembal, who was a Minister during the war. he had risen rapidly to an important post in that department, of the public service known as the Conseil d’Etat, a sort of administrative court of appeal; and he occupied his leisure during these years in literary and dramatic criticism—he was dramatic critic for the “Matin.” If politics had not called him, he would have added, more than he has had time to do, to the long list of valuable contributions to European literature which have been made by the Jewish race. Even as it is, his share is by no means negligible, and his book on marriage and his study of Stendhal are brilliant evidences of the refinement, subtlety, and taste of his keen intelligence, which is also displayed in his almost daily leading articles in the party organ, “Le Populaire.”

He is a Parisian, although the upper-middle-class family into which he was born sixty-four years ago came from the east of France. His education— Lycee Charlemagne and the Ecole Normale —is Parisian also, and so, it might be said, are his very courteous manners—obsequious, his enemies call them—and his habit of mind.

Leon Blum is tall, and although he is not now’ so thin as he was a few' years ago, he is slight, and his figure, on long and thin legs, has tlie same kind of nervous and almost anxious distinction as his face, with its long nose, its drooping moustache, and those brilliant eyes behind pince-nez, which are constantly falling off, and as constantly being hurriedly readjusted. It is difficult to account for his influence as a speaker’in the Chamber except by the direef interest in what he is saying and the curiosity as to what line will be taken by this personality, which, in spite of its real kindliness, is as reserved and mysterious to the Deputies in general as to the members of his own party in particular. It is difficult, because physically he lias much against him as an orator. His voice has little volume at any time, and even less when he is excited. He is short-sighted and cannot capture his audience with the eye. Nor can he do so by expansive gesture, for his figure is neither broad nor imposing, and lie is so far from theatricalism as to seem incapable of making even a spontaneous oratorical effect. Moreover, he is in a state of constant agitation, passing his handkerchief, rolled into a ball, from one hand to the other walking up and down as he speaks. And yet he can command silence. His very nervousness suggests a sort of passionate inspiration, and, above all, he rivets the attention by the sensitive and sympathetic lucidity of the intelligence which is developed in the course of his argument. He has a mastery of precise and delicately chosen language, and he has the ideas to clothe with it His critics say he is too ingenious, that his hair-split ting is too subtle. But if he were not subtle, he would not be Leon Blum.