Hours in a Library

Chapter 16

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What I have called Hazlitt"s egotism is more euphemistically and perhaps more accurately described by Talfourd,[3] "an intense consciousness of his own individual being." The word egotism in our rough estimates of character is too easily confounded with selfishness. Hazlitt might have been the person who, as one making a strange confession, a.s.sured a friend that he took a deep interest in his own concerns. He was, one would say, decidedly unselfish, if by selfishness is meant a disposition to feather one"s own nest without regard for other people"s wants. Still less was he selfish in the sense of preferring solid bread and b.u.t.ter to the higher needs of mind and spirit. His sentiments are always generous, and if scorn is too familiar a mood, it is scorn of the base and servile. But his peculiarity is that these generous feelings are always a.s.sociated with some special case. He sees every abstract principle by the concrete instance. He hates insolence in the abstract, but his hatred flames into pa.s.sion when it is insolence to Hazlitt. He resembles that good old lady who wrote on the margin of her "Complete Duty of Man"

the name of that neighbour who most conspicuously sinned against the precept in the opposite text. Tyranny with Hazlitt is named Pitt, party spite is Gifford, apostasy is Southey, and fidelity may be called Cobbett or G.o.dwin; though he finds names for the vices much more easily than for the virtues. And thus, if he cannot be condemned for selfishness, one must be charitable not to put down a good many of his offences to its sister jealousy. The personal and the public sentiments are so invariably blended in his mind that neither he nor anybody else could have a.n.a.lysed their composition. He was apt to be the more moody and irritable because his resentments clothed themselves spontaneously in the language of some n.o.bler emotion. If his friends are cold, he bewails the fickleness of humanity; if they are successful, it is not envy that prompts his irritation, but the rarity of the correspondence between merit and reward. Such a man is more faithful to his dead than to his living friends. The dead cannot change; they always come back to his memory in their old colours; their names recall the old tender emotion placed above all change and chance. But who can tell that our dearest living friend may not come into awkward collision with us before he has left the room? It is as well to be on our guard! It is curious how the two feelings alternate in Hazlitt"s mind in regard to the friends who are at once dead and living; how fondly he dwells upon the Coleridge of Wem and Nether Stowey where he first listened to the enchanter"s voice, and with what bitterness, which is yet but soured affection, he turns upon the Coleridge who defended war-taxes in the "Friend." He hacks and hews at Southey through several furious Essays, and ends with a groan. "We met him unexpectedly the other day in St.

Giles"s," he says, "were sorry we had pa.s.sed him without speaking to an old friend, turned and looked after him for some time as to a tale of other days--sighing, as we walked on, Alas, poor Southey!" He fancies himself to be in the mood of Brutus murdering Caesar. It is patriotism struggling with old a.s.sociations of friendship; if there is any personal element in the hostility, no one is less conscious of it than the possessor. To the whole Lake school his att.i.tude is always the same--justice done grudgingly in spite of anger, or satire tempered by remorse. No one could say nastier things of that very different egotist, Wordsworth; nor could anyone, outside the sacred clique, pay him heartier compliments. n.o.body, indeed, can dislike egotism like an egotist. "Wordsworth," says Hazlitt, "sees nothing but himself and the universe; he hates all greatness and all pretensions to it but his own.

His egotism is in this respect a madness, for he scorns even the admiration of himself, thinking it a presumption in anyone to suppose that he has taste or sense enough to understand him. He hates all science and all art: he hates chemistry, he hates conchology, he hates Sir Isaac Newton, he hates logic, he hates metaphysics," and so on through a long list of hatreds, ending with the inimitable Napoleon, whom Wordsworth hates, it seems, "to get rid of the idea of anything greater, or thought to be greater, than himself." Hazlitt might have made out a tolerable list of his own antipathies; though, to do him justice, of antipathies balanced by ardent enthusiasm, especially for the dead or the distant.

Hazlitt, indeed, was incapable of the superlative self-esteem here attributed to Wordsworth. His egotism is a curious variety of that Protean pa.s.sion, compounded as skilfully as the melancholy of Jaques. It is not the fascinating and humorous egotism of Lamb, who disarms us beforehand by a smile at his own crotchets. Hazlitt is too serious to be playful. Nor is it like the amusing egotism of Boswell, combined with a vanity which evades our contempt, because it asks so frankly for sympathy. Hazlitt is too proud and too bitter. Neither is it the misanthropic egotism of Byron, which, through all its affectation, implies a certain aristocratic contempt of the world and its laws.

Hazlitt has not the sweep and continuity of Byron"s pa.s.sion. His egotism--be it said without offence--is dashed with something of the feeling common amongst his dissenting friends. He feels the awkwardness which prevails amongst a clique branded by a certain social stigma, and despises himself for his awkwardness. He resents neglect and scorns to ask for patronage. His egotism is a touchy and wayward feeling which takes the mask of misanthropy. He is always meditating upon his own qualities, but not in the spirit of the conceited man who plumes himself upon his virtues, nor of the ascetic who broods over his vices. He prefers the apparently self-contradictory att.i.tude (but human nature is illogical) of meditating with remorse upon his own virtues. What in others is complacency, becomes with him, ostensibly at least, self-reproach. He affects--but it is hard to say where the affectation begins--to be annoyed by the contemplation of his own merits. He is angry with the world for preferring commonplace to genius, and rewarding stupidity by success; but in form at least, he mocks at his own folly for expecting better things. If he is vain at bottom, his vanity shows itself indirectly by depreciating his neighbours. He is too proud to dwell upon his own virtues, but he has been convinced by impartial observation that the world at large is in a conspiracy against merit.

Thus he manages to transform his self-consciousness into the semblance of proud humility, and extracts a bitter and rather morbid pleasure from dwelling upon his disappointments and failures. Half-a-dozen of his best Essays give expression to this mood, which is rather bitter than querulous. He enlarges cordially on the "disadvantages of intellectual superiority." An author--Hazlitt, to wit--is not allowed to relax into dulness; if he is brilliant he is not understood, and if he professes an interest in common things it is a.s.sumed that then he must be a fool. And yet in the midst of these grumblings he is forced to admit a touch of weakness, and tells us how it pleases him to hear a man ask in the Fives Court, "Which is Mr. Hazlitt?" He, the most idiosyncratic of men, and most proud of it at bottom, declares how "he hates his style to be known, as he hates all idiosyncrasy." At the next moment he purrs with complacency at the recollection of having been forced into an avowal of his authorship of an article in the "Edinburgh Review." Most generally he eschews these nave lapses into vanity. He dilates on the old text of the "shyness of scholars." The learned are out of place in compet.i.tion with the world. They are not and ought not to fancy themselves fitted for the vulgar arena. They can never enjoy their old privileges. "Fool that it (learning) was, ever to forego its privileges and loosen the strong hold it had on opinion in bigotry and superst.i.tion!" The same tone of disgust p.r.o.nounces itself more cynically in an Essay "on the pleasure of hating." Hatred is, he admits, a poisonous ingredient in all our pa.s.sions, but it is that which gives reality to them. Patriotism means hatred of the French, and virtue is a hatred of other people"s faults to atone for our own vices. All things turn to hatred. "We hate old friends, we hate old books, we hate old opinions, and at last we come to hate ourselves." Summing up all his disappointments, the broken friendships, and disappointed ambitions, and vanished illusions, he asks, in conclusion, whether he has not come to hate and despise himself? "Indeed, I do," he answers, "and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough."

This is an outbreak of temporary spleen. n.o.body loved his old books and old opinions better. Hazlitt is speaking in the character of Timon, which indeed fits him rather too easily. But elsewhere the same strain of cynicism comes out in more natural and less extravagant form. Take, for example, the Essay on the "Conduct of Life." It is a piece of _bona fide_ advice addressed to his boy at school, and gives in a sufficiently edifying form the commonplaces which elders are accustomed to address to their juniors. Honesty, independence, diligence, and temperance are commended in good set terms, though with an earnestness which, as is often the case with Hazlitt, imparts some reality to outworn formulae.

When, however, he comes to the question of marriage, the true man breaks out. Don"t trust, he says, to fine sentiments: they will make no more impression on these delicate creatures than on a piece of marble. Love in women is vanity, interest, or fancy. Women care nothing about talents or virtue--about poets or philosophers or politicians. They judge by the eye. "No true woman ever regarded anything but her lover"s person and address." The author has no chance; for he lives in a dream, he feels nothing spontaneously, his metaphysical refinements are all thrown away.

"Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the colour in your cheek and the fire in your eye; adorn your person; maintain your health, your beauty, and your animal spirits; for if you once lapse into poetry and philosophy you will want an eye to show you, a hand to guide you, a bosom to love--and will stagger into your grave old before your time, unloved and unlovely." "A spider," he adds, "the meanest creature that crawls or lives, has its mate or fellow, but a scholar has no mate or fellow." Mrs. Hazlitt, Miss Sarah Walker, and several other ladies, thought Hazlitt surly and cared nothing for his treatise on human nature. Therefore (it is true Hazlittian logic) no woman cares for sentiment. The s.e.x which despised him must be despicable. Equally characteristic is his profound belief that his failure in another line is owing to the malignity of the world at large. In one of his most characteristic Essays he asks whether genius is conscious of its powers.

He writes what he declares to be a digression about his own experience, and we may believe as much as we please of his a.s.sertion that he does not quote himself as an example of genius. He has spoken, he declares, with freedom and power, and will not cease because he is abused for not being a Government tool. He wrote a charming character of Congreve"s Millamant, but it was unnoticed because he was not a Government tool.

Gifford would not relish his account of Dekkar"s Orlando Friscobaldo--because he was not a Government tool. He wrote admirable table-talks--for once, as they are nearly finished, he will venture to praise himself. He could swear (were they not his) that the thoughts in them were "founded as the rock, free as the air, the hue like an Italian picture." But, had the style been like polished steel, as firm and as bright, it would have availed him nothing, for he was not a Government tool. The world hated him, we see, for his merits. It is a bad world, he says; but don"t think that it is my vanity which has taken offence, for I am remarkable for modesty, and therefore I know that my virtues are faults of which I ought to be ashamed. Is this pride or vanity, or humility, or cynicism, or self-reproach for wasted talents, or an intimate blending of pa.s.sions for which there is no precise name? Who can unravel the masks within masks of a cunning egotism?

To one virtue, however, that of political constancy, Hazlitt lays claim in the most emphatic terms. If he quarrels with all his friends--"most of the friends I have seen have turned out the bitterest enemies, or cold, uncomfortable acquaintance"--it is, of course, their fault. A thoroughgoing egotist must think himself the centre of gravity of the world, and all change of relations must mean that others have moved away from him. Politically, too, all who have given up his opinions are deserters, and generally from the worst of motives. He accuses Burke of turning against the Revolution from--of all motives in the world!--jealousy of Rousseau; a theory still more impossible than Mr.

Buckle"s hypothesis of madness. Court favour supplies in most cases a simpler explanation of the general demoralisation. Hazlitt could not give credit to men like Southey and Coleridge for sincere alarm at the French Revolution. Such a sentiment would be too unreasonable, for he had not been alarmed himself. His constancy, indeed, would be admirable if it did not suggest doubts of his wisdom. A man whose opinions at fifty are his opinions at fourteen has opinions of very little value. If his intellect has developed properly, or if he has profited by experience, he will modify, though he need not retract, his early views.

To claim to have learnt nothing from 1792 to 1830 is almost to write yourself down as hopelessly impenetrable. The explanation is, that what Hazlitt called his opinions were really his feelings. He could argue very ingeniously, as appears from his remarks on Coleridge and Malthus, but his logic was the slave, not the ruler, of his emotions. His politics were simply the expression, in a generalised form, of his intense feeling of personality. They are a projection upon the modern political world of that heroic spirit of individual self-respect which animated his Puritan forefathers. One question, and only one question, he frequently tells us, is of real importance. All the rest is mere verbiage. The single dogma worth attacking or defending is the divine right of kings. Are men, in the old phrase, born saddled and bridled, and other men ready booted and spurred, or are they not? That is the single shibboleth which distinguishes true men from false. Others, he says, bowed their heads to the image of the beast. "I spit upon it, and buffeted it, and pointed at it, and drew aside the veil that then half concealed it." This pa.s.sionate denial of the absolute right of men over their fellows is but vicarious pride, if you please to call it so, or a generous recognition of the dignity of human nature translated into political terms. Hazlitt"s character did not change, however much his judgment of individuals might change; and therefore the principles which merely reflected his character remained rooted and unshaken. And yet his politics changed curiously enough in another sense. The abstract truth, in Hazlitt"s mind, must always have a concrete symbol. He chose to regard Napoleon as the ant.i.thesis to the divine right of kings. That was the vital formula of Napoleon, his essence, and the true meaning of his policy. The one question in abstract politics was typified for Hazlitt by the contrast between Napoleon and the Holy Alliance. To prove that Napoleon could trample on human rights as roughly as any legitimate sovereign was for him mere waste of time. Napoleon"s tyranny meant a fair war against the evil principle. Had Hazlitt lived in France, and come into collision with press laws, it is likely enough that his sentiments would have changed. But Napoleon was far enough off to serve as a mere poetical symbol; his memory had got itself entwined in those youthful a.s.sociations on which Hazlitt always dwelt so fondly; and, moreover, to defend "Boney" was to quarrel with most of his countrymen, and even of his own party. What more was wanted to make him one of Hazlitt"s superst.i.tions? No more ardent devotee of the Napoleonic legend ever existed, and Hazlitt"s last years were employed in writing a book which is a political pamphlet as much as a history. He worships the eldest Napoleon with the fervour of a corporal of the Old Guard, and denounces the great conspiracy of kings and n.o.bles with the energy of Cobbett; but he had none of the special knowledge which alone could give permanent value to such a performance. He seems to have consulted only the French authorities; and it is refreshing for once to find an Englishman telling the story of Waterloo entirely from the French side, and speaking, for example, of left and right as if he had been--as in imagination he was--by the side of Napoleon instead of Wellington. Even M. Victor Hugo can see more merit in the English army and its commander.

A radical, who takes Napoleon for his polar star, must change some of his theories, though he disguises the change from himself; but a change of a different kind came over Hazlitt as he grew older.

The enthusiasm of the Southeys and Wordsworths for the French Revolution changed--whatever their motives--into enthusiasm for the established order. Hazlitt"s enthusiasm remained, but became the enthusiasm of regret instead of hope. As one by one the former zealots dropped off he despised them as renegades, and clasped his old creed the more firmly to his bosom. But the change did not draw him nearer to the few who remained faithful. They perversely loved the wrong side of the right cause, or loved it for the wrong reason. He liked the Whigs no better than the Tories; the "Edinburgh" and the "Quarterly" were opposition coaches, making a great dust and spattering each other with mud, but travelling by the same road to the same end. A Whig, he said, was a trimmer who dared neither to be a rogue nor an honest man, but was "a sort of whiffling, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two." And the true genuine radical reformers? To them, as represented by the school of Bentham, Hazlitt entertained an aversion quite as hearty as his aversion for Whigs and Tories. If, he says, the Whigs are too finical to join heartily with the popular advocates, the Reformers are too cold. They hated literature, poetry, and romance; nothing gives them pleasure that does not give others pain; utilitarianism means prosaic, hard-hearted, narrow-minded dogmatism.

Indeed, his pet essay on the principles of human nature was simply an a.s.sault on what he took to be their fundamental position. He fancied that the school of Bentham regarded man as a purely selfish and calculating animal; and his whole philosophy was an attempt to prove the natural disinterestedness of man, and to indicate for the imagination and the emotions their proper place beside the calculating faculty. Few were those who did not come under one or other clause of this sweeping denunciation. He a.s.sailed Sh.e.l.ley, who was neither Whig, Tory, nor Utilitarian, so cuttingly as to provoke a dispute with Leigh Hunt, and had some of his sharp criticisms for his friend G.o.dwin. His general moral, indeed, is the old congenial one. The reformer is as unfit for this world as the scholar. He is the only wise man, but, as things go, wisdom is the worst of follies. The reformer, he says, is necessarily a marplot; he does not know what he would be at; if he did, he does not much care for it; and, moreover, he is "governed habitually by a spirit of contradiction, and is always wise beyond what is practicable." Upon this text Hazlitt dilates with immense spirit, satirising the crotchety and impracticable race, and contrasting them with the disciplined phalanx of Toryism, brilliantly and bitterly enough to delight Gifford; and yet he is writing a preface to a volume of radical Essays. He is consoling himself for being in a minority of one by proving that two virtuous men must always disagree. Hazlitt is no genuine democrat. He hates "both mobs," or, in other words, the great ma.s.s of the human race.

He would sympathise with Coriola.n.u.s more easily than with the Tribunes.

He laughs at the perfectibility of the species, and holds that "all things move, not in progress but in a ceaseless round." The glorious dream is fled:

The radiance which was once so bright Is now for ever taken from our sight;

and his only consolation is to live over in memory the sanguine times of his youth, before Napoleon had fallen and the Holy Alliance restored the divine right of kings; to cherish eternal regret for the hopes that have departed, and hatred and scorn equally enduring for those who blasted them. "Give me back," he exclaims, "one single evening at Boxhill, after a stroll in the deep empurpled woods, before Bonaparte was yet beaten, with "wine of Attic taste," when wit, beauty, friendship presided at the board." The personal blends with the political regret.

Hazlitt, the politician, was soured. He fed his morbid egotism by indignantly chewing the cud of disappointment, and scornfully rejecting comfort. He quarrelled with his wife and with most of his friends, even with the gentle Lamb, till Lamb regained his affections by the brief quarrel with Southey. Certainly, he might call himself, with some plausibility, "the king of good haters." But, after all, Hazlitt"s cynicism is the souring of a generous nature; and when we turn from the politician to the critic and the essayist, our admiration for his powers is less frequently jarred by annoyance at their wayward misuse. His egotism--for he is still an egotist--here takes a different shape. His criticism is not of the kind which is now most popular. He lived before the days of philosophers who talk about the organism and its environment, and of the connoisseurs who boast of an eclectic taste for all the delicate essences of art. He never thought of showing that a great writer was only the product of his time, race, and climate; and he had not learnt to use such terms of art as "supreme," "gracious,"

"tender," "bitter," and "subtle," in which a good deal of criticism now consists. Lamb, says Hazlitt, tried old authors "on his palate as epicures taste olives;" and the delicacy of discrimination which makes the process enjoyable is perhaps the highest qualification of a good critic. Hazlitt"s point of view was rather different, nor can we ascribe to him without qualification that exquisite appreciation of purely literary charm which is so rare and so often affected. n.o.body, indeed, loved some authors more heartily or understood them better; his love is so hearty that he cannot preserve the true critical att.i.tude. Instead of trying them on his palate, he swallows them greedily. His judgment of an author seems to depend upon two circ.u.mstances. He is determined in great measure by his private a.s.sociations, and in part by his sympathy for the character of the writer. His interest in this last sense is, one may say, rather psychological than purely critical. He thinks of an author not as the exponent of a particular vein of thought or emotion, nor as an artistic performer on the instrument of language, but as a human being to be loved or hated, or both, like Napoleon or Gifford or Southey.

Hazlitt"s favourite authors were, for the most part, the friends of his youth. He had pored over their pages till he knew them by heart; their phrases were as familiar to his lips as texts of Scripture to preachers who know but one book; the places where he had read them became sacred to him, and a glory of his early enthusiasm was still reflected from the old pages. Rousseau was his beloved above all writers. They had a natural affinity. What Hazlitt says of Rousseau may be partly applied to himself. Of Hazlitt it might be said almost as truly as of Rousseau, that "he had the most intense consciousness of his own existence. No object that had once made an impression upon him was ever after effaced." In Rousseau"s "Confessions" and "Nouvelle Helose," Hazlitt saw the reflections of his own pa.s.sions. He spent, he declares, two whole years in reading these two books; and they were the happiest years of his life. He marks with a white stone the days on which he read particular pa.s.sages. It was on April 10, 1798--as he tells us some twenty years later--that he sat down to a volume of the "New Helose,"

at the inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken. He tells us which pa.s.sage he read and what was the view before his bodily eyes. His first reading of "Paul and Virginia" is a.s.sociated with an inn at Bridgewater; and at another old-fashioned inn he tells how the rustic fare and the quaint architecture gave additional piquancy to Congreve"s wit. He remembers, too, the spot at which he first read Mrs. Inchbald"s "Simple Story;" how he walked out to escape from one of the tenderest parts, in order to return again with double relish.

"An old crazy hand-organ," he adds, "was playing "Robin Adair," a summer shower dropped manna on my head, and slaked my feverish thirst of happiness." He looks back to his first familiarity with his favourites as an old man may think of his honeymoon. The memories of his own feelings, of his author"s poetry, and of the surrounding scenery, are inextricably fused together. The sight of an old volume, he says, sometimes shakes twenty years off his life; he sees his old friends alive again, the place where he read the book, the day when he got it, the feeling of the air, the fields, the sky. To these old favourites he remained faithful, except that he seems to have tired of the glitter of Junius. Burke"s politics gave him some severe twinges. He says, in one place, that he always tests the sense and candour of a Liberal by his willingness to admit the greatness of Burke. He adds, as a note to the Essay in which this occurs, that it was written in a "fit of extravagant candour," when he thought that he could be more than just to an enemy without betraying a cause. He oscillates between these views as his humour changes. He is absurdly unjust to Burke the politician; but he does not waver in his just recognition of the marvellous power of the greatest--I should almost say the only great--political writer in the language. The first time he read a pa.s.sage from Burke, he said, This is true eloquence. Johnson immediately became shelved, and Junius "shrunk up into little ant.i.thetic points and well-tuned sentences. But Burke"s style was forked and playful like the lightning, crested like the serpent." He is never weary of Burke, as he elsewhere says; and, in fact, he is man enough to recognise genuine power when he meets it. To another great master he yields with a reluctance which is an involuntary compliment. The one author whom he admitted into his Pantheon after his youthful enthusiasm had cooled was unluckily the most consistent of Tories. Who is there, he asks, that admires the author of "Waverley"

more than I do? Who is there that despises Sir Walter Scott more? The Scotch novels, as they were then called, fairly overpowered him. The imaginative force, the geniality and the wealth of picturesque incident of the greatest of novelists, disarmed his antipathy. It is curious to see how he struggles with himself. He blesses and curses in a breath. He applies to Scott Pope"s description of Bacon, "the greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind," and asks--

Who would not laugh if such a man there be?

Who would not weep if "Waverley" were he?

He crowns a torrent of abuse by declaring that Scott has encouraged the lowest panders of a venal press, "deluging and nauseating the public mind with the offal and garbage of Billingsgate abuse and vulgar slang;"

and presently he calls Scott--by way, it is true, of lowering Byron--"one of the greatest teachers of morality that ever lived." He invents a theory, to which he returns more than once, to justify the contrast. Scott, he says, is much such a writer as the Duke of Wellington (the hated ant.i.thesis of Napoleon, whose "foolish face" he specially detests) is a general. The one gets 100,000 men together, and "leaves it to them to fight out the battle, for if he meddled with it he might spoil sport; the other gets an innumerable quant.i.ty of facts together, and lets them tell their story as they may. The facts are stubborn in the last instance as the men are in the first, and in neither case is the broth spoiled by the cook." Both heroes show modesty and self-knowledge, but "little boldness or inventiveness of genius." On the strength of this doctrine he even compares Scott disadvantageously with G.o.dwin and Mrs. Inchbald, who had, it seems, more invention though fewer facts. Hazlitt was not bound to understand strategy, and devoutly held that Wellington"s armies succeeded because their general only looked on. But he should have understood his own trade a little better.

Putting aside this grotesque theory, he feels Scott"s greatness truly, and admits it generously. He enjoys the broth, to use his own phrase, though he is determined to believe that it somehow made itself.

Lamb said that Hazlitt was a greater authority when he praised than when he abused, a doctrine which may be true of others than Hazlitt. The true distinction is rather that Hazlitt, though always unsafe as a judge, is admirable as an advocate in his own cause, and poor when merely speaking from his brief. Of Mrs. Inchbald I must say what Hazlitt shocked his audience by saying of Hannah More; that she has written a good deal which I have not read, and I therefore cannot deny that her novels might have been written by Venus; but I cannot admit that Wycherley"s brutal "Plain-dealer" is as good as ten volumes of sermons. "It is curious to see," says Hazlitt, rather navely, "how the same subject is treated by two such different authors as Shakespeare and Wycherley." Macaulay"s remark about the same coincidence is more to the point. "Wycherley borrows Viola," says that vigorous moralist, "and Viola forthwith becomes a pander of the basest sort." That is literally true. Indeed, Hazlitt"s love for the dramatists of the Restoration is something of a puzzle, except so far as it is explained by early a.s.sociations. Even then it is hard to explain the sympathy which Hazlitt, the lover of Rousseau and sentiment, feels for Congreve, whose speciality it is that a touch of sentiment is as rare in his painfully-witty dialogues as a drop of water in the desert. Perhaps a contempt for the prejudices of respectable people gave zest to Hazlitt"s enjoyment of a literature, representative of a social atmosphere, most propitious to his best feelings. And yet, though I cannot take Hazlitt"s judgment, I would frankly admit that Hazlitt"s enthusiasm brings out Congreve"s real merits with a force of which a calmer judge would be incapable. His warm praises of "The Beggar"s Opera," his a.s.sault upon Sidney"s "Arcadia,"

his sarcasms against Tom Moore, are all excellent in their way, whether we do or do not agree with his final result. Whenever Hazlitt writes from his own mind, in short, he writes what is well worth reading.

Hazlitt learnt something in his later years from Lamb. He prefers, he says, those papers of Elia in which there is the least infusion of antiquated language; and, in fact, Lamb never inoculated him with his taste for the old English literature. Hazlitt gave a series of lectures upon the Elizabethan dramatists, and carelessly remarks some time afterwards that he has only read about a quarter of Beaumont and Fletcher"s plays, and intends to read the rest when he has a chance. It is plain, indeed, that the lectures, though written at times with great spirit, are the work of a man who has got them up for the occasion. And in his more ambitious and successful essays upon Shakespeare the same want of reading appears in another way. He is more familiar with Shakespeare"s text than many better scholars. His familiarity is proved by a habit of quotation of which it has been disputed whether it is a merit or a defect. What phrenologists would call the adhesiveness of Hazlitt"s mind, its extreme retentiveness for any impression which has once been received, tempts him to a constant repet.i.tion of familiar phrases and ill.u.s.trations. He has, too, a trick of working in patches of his old essays, which he expressly defends on the ground that a book which has not reached a second edition may be considered by its author as ma.n.u.script. This self-plagiarism sometimes worries us, as we are worried by a man whose conversation runs in ruts. But his quotations from other authors, where used in moderation, often give a pleasant richness to his style. Shakespeare, in particular, seems to be a storehouse into which he can always dip for an appropriate turn of phrase, and his love of Shakespeare is of a characteristic kind. He has not counted syllables nor weighed various readings. He does not throw a new light upon delicate indications of thought and sentiment, nor philosophise after the manner of Coleridge and the Germans, nor regard Shakespeare as the representative of his age according to the sweeping method of M. Taine. Neither does he seem to love Shakespeare himself as he loves Rousseau or Richardson. He speaks contemptuously of the Sonnets and Poems, and, though I respect his sincerity, I think that such a verdict necessarily indicates indifference to the most Shakespearian parts of Shakespeare. The calm a.s.sertion that the qualities of the Poems are the reverse of the qualities of the plays is unworthy of Hazlitt"s general acuteness. That which really attracts Hazlitt is sufficiently indicated by the t.i.tle of his book; he describes the characters of Shakespeare"s plays. It is Iago, and Timon, and Coriola.n.u.s, and Anthony, and Cleopatra, who really interest him. He loves and hates them as if they were his own contemporaries; he gives the main outlines of their character with a spirited touch. And yet one somehow feels that Hazlitt is not at his best in Shakespearian criticism; his eulogies savour of commonplace, and are wanting in spontaneity. There is not that warm glow of personal feeling which gives light and warmth to his style whenever he touches upon his early favourites. Perhaps he is a little daunted by the greatness of his task, and perhaps there is something in the Shakespearian width of sympathy and in the Shakespearian humour which lies beyond Hazlitt"s sphere. His criticism of Hamlet is feeble; he does not do justice to Mercutio or to Jaques; but he sympathises more heartily with the tremendous pa.s.sion of Lear and Oth.e.l.lo, and finds something congenial to his taste in Coriola.n.u.s and Timon of Athens. It is characteristic, too, that he evidently understands Shakespeare better on the stage than in the closet. When he can a.s.sociate Iago and Shylock with the visible presence of Kean, he can introduce that personal element which is so necessary to his best writing.

The best, indeed, of Hazlitt"s criticisms--if the word may be so far extended--are his criticisms of living men. The criticism of contemporary portraits called the "Spirit of the Age" is one of the first of those series which have now become popular, as it is certainly one of the very best. The descriptions of Bentham, and G.o.dwin, and Coleridge, and Horne Tooke are masterpieces in their way. They are, of course, unfair; but that is part of their charm. One would no more take for granted Hazlitt"s valuation of Wordsworth than Timon"s judgment of Alcibiades. Hazlitt sees through coloured gla.s.ses, but his vision is not the less penetrating. The vulgar satirist is such a one as Hazlitt somewhere mentioned who called Wordsworth a dunce. Hazlitt was quite incapable of such a solecism. He knew, n.o.body better, that a telling caricature must be a good likeness. If he darkens the shades, and here and there exaggerates an ungainly feature, we still know that the shade exists and that the feature is not symmetrical. De Quincey reports the saying of some admiring friend of Hazlitt, who confessed to a shudder whenever Hazlitt used his habitual gesture of placing his hand within his waistcoat. The hand might emerge armed with a dagger. Whenever, said the same friend (Heaven preserve us from our friends!), Hazlitt had been distracted for a moment from the general conversation, he looked round with a mingled air of suspicion and defiance, as though some objectionable phrase might have evaded his censure in the interval. The traits recur to us when we read Hazlitt"s descriptions of the men he had known. We seem to see the dark sardonic man, watching the faces and gestures of his friends, ready to take sudden offence at any affront to his cherished prejudices, and yet hampered by a kind of nervous timidity which makes him unpleasantly conscious of his own awkwardness. He remains silent, till somebody unwittingly contradicts his unspoken thoughts--the most irritating kind of contradiction to some people!--and perhaps heaps indiscriminating praise on an old friend, a term nearly synonymous with an old enemy. Then the dagger suddenly flashes out, and Hazlitt strikes two or three rapid blows, aimed with unerring accuracy at the weak points of the armour which he knows so well. And then, as he strikes, a relenting comes over him; he remembers old days with a sudden gush of fondness, and puts in a touch of scorn for his allies or himself. Coleridge may deserve a blow, but the applause of Coleridge"s enemies awakes his self-reproach. His invective turns into panegyric, and he warms for a time into hearty admiration, which proves that his irritation arises from an excess, not from a defect, of sensibility; but finding that he has gone a little too far, he lets his praise slide into equivocal description, and, with some parting epigram, he relapses into silence. The portraits thus drawn are never wanting in piquancy nor in fidelity. Brooding over his injuries and his desertions, Hazlitt has pondered almost with the eagerness of a lover upon the qualities of his intimates. Suspicion, unjust it may be, has given keenness to his investigation. He has interpreted in his own fashion every mood and gesture. He has watched his friends as a courtier watches a royal favourite. He has stored in his memory, as we fancy, the good retorts which his shyness or unreadiness smothered at the propitious moment, and brings them out in the shape of a personal description. When such a man sits at our tables, silent and apparently self-absorbed, and yet shrewd and sensitive, we may well be afraid of the dagger, though it may not be drawn till after our death, and may write memoirs instead of piercing flesh. And yet Hazlitt is no mean a.s.sa.s.sin of reputations; nor is his enmity as a rule more than the seamy side of friendship. Gifford, indeed, and Croker, "the talking potato," are treated as outside the pale of human rights.

Excellent as Hazlitt can be as a dispenser of praise and blame, he seems to me to be at his best in a different capacity. The first of his performances which attracted much attention was the Round Table, designed by Leigh Hunt (who contributed a few papers), on the old "Spectator" model. In the essays afterwards collected in the volumes called "Table Talk" and the "Plain Speaker," he is still better, because more certain of his position. It would, indeed, be difficult to name any writer, from the days of Addison to those of Lamb, who has equalled Hazlitt"s best performances of this kind. Addison is too unlike to justify a comparison; and, to say the truth, though he has rather more in common with Lamb, the contrast is much more obvious than the resemblance. Each wants the other"s most characteristic vein; Hazlitt has hardly a touch of humour, and Lamb is incapable of Hazlitt"s caustic scorn for the world and himself. They have indeed in common, besides certain superficial tastes, a love of pathetic brooding over the past.

But the sentiment exerted is radically different. Lamb forgets himself when brooding over an old author or summing up the "old familiar faces."

His melancholy and his mirth cast delightful cross-lights upon the topics of which he converses, and we do not know, until we pause to reflect, that it is not the intrinsic merit of the objects, but Lamb"s own character, which has caused our pleasure. They would be dull, that is, in other hands; but the feeling is embodied in the object described, and not made itself the source of our interest. With Hazlitt, it is the opposite. He is never more present than when he is dwelling upon the past. Even in criticising a book or a man, his favourite mode is to tell us how he came to love or to hate him; and in the non-critical Essays he is always appealing to us, directly or indirectly, for sympathy with his own personal emotions. He tells us how pa.s.sionately he is yearning for the days of his youth; he is trying to escape from his pressing annoyances; wrapping himself in sacred a.s.sociations against the fret and worry of surrounding cares; repaying himself for the scorn of women or Quarterly Reviewers by retreating into some imaginary hermitage; and it is the delight of dreaming upon which he dwells more than upon the beauty of the visions revealed to his inward eye. The force with which this sentiment is presented gives a curious fascination to some of his essays. Take, for example, the essay in "Table Talk," "On Living to One"s self,"--an essay written, as he is careful to tell us, on a mild January day in the country, whilst the fire is blazing on the hearth and a partridge getting ready for his supper. There he expatiates in happy isolation on the enjoyments of living as "a silent spectator of the mighty scheme of things;" as being in the world, and not of it; watching the clouds and the stars, poring over a book, or gazing at a picture without a thought of becoming an author or an artist. He has drifted into a quiet little backwater, and congratulates himself in all sincerity on his escape from the turbulent stream outside. He drinks in the delight of rest at every pore; reduces himself for the time to the state of a polyp drifting on the warm ocean stream, and becomes a voluptuous hermit. He calls up the old days when he acted up to his principles, and found pleasure enough in endless meditation and quiet observation of nature. He preaches most edifyingly on the disappointments, the excitements, the rough impacts of hard facts upon sensitive natures, which haunt the world outside, and declares, in all sincerity, "this sort of dreaming existence is the best; he who quits it to go in search of realities generally barters repose for repeated disappointments and vain regrets." He is sincere, and therefore eloquent; and we need not, unless we please, add the remark that he enjoys rest because it is a relief from toil; and that he will curse the country as heartily as any man if doomed to entire rest. This meditation on the phenomena of his own sensations leads him often into interesting reflections of a psychological kind. He a.n.a.lyses his own feelings with constant eagerness, as he a.n.a.lyses the character of his enemies. A good specimen is the essay "On Antiquity" in the "Plain Speaker," which begins with some striking remarks on the apparently arbitrary mode in which some objects and periods seem older to us than others, in defiance of chronology. The monuments of the Middle Ages seem more antique than the Greek statues and temples with their immortal youth. "It is not the full-grown, articulated, thoroughly accomplished periods of the world that we regard with the pity or reverence due to age, so much as those imperfect, unformed, uncertain periods which seem to totter on the verge of non-existence, to shrink from the grasp of our feeble imagination, as they crawl out of, or retire into the womb of time, of which our utmost a.s.surance is to doubt whether they ever were or not." And then, as usual, he pa.s.ses to his own experience, and meditates on the changed aspect of the world in youth and maturer life. The petty, personal emotions pa.s.s away, whilst the grand and ideal "remains with us unimpaired in its lofty abstraction from age to age." Therefore, though the inference is not quite clear, he can never forget the first time he saw Mrs. Siddons act, or the appearance of Burke"s "Letter to a n.o.ble Lord." And then, in a pa.s.sage worthy of Sir Thomas Browne, he describes the change produced as our minds are stereotyped, as our most striking thoughts become truisms, and we lose the faculty of admiration. In our youth "art woos us; science tempts us with her intricate labyrinths; each step presents unlooked-for vistas, and closes upon us our backward path. Our onward road is strange, obscure, and infinite. We are bewildered in a shadow, lost in a dream. Our perceptions have the brightness and indistinctness of a trance. Our continuity of consciousness is broken, crumbles, and falls to pieces. We go on learning and forgetting every hour. Our feelings are chaotic, confused, strange to each other and ourselves." But in time we learn by rote the lessons which we had to spell out in our youth. "A very short period (from 15 to 25 or 30) includes the whole map and table of contents of human life. From that time we may be said to live our lives over again, repeat ourselves--the same thoughts return at stated intervals, like the tunes of a barrel-organ; and the volume of the universe is no more than a form of words, a book of reference."

From such musings Hazlitt can turn to describe any fresh impression which has interested him, in spite of his occasional weariness, with a freshness and vivacity which proves that his eye had not grown dim, nor his temperament incapable of enjoyment. He fell in love with Miss Sarah Wilson at the tolerably ripe age of 43; and his desire to live in the past is not to be taken more seriously than his contempt for his literary reputation. It lasts only till some vivid sensation occurs in the present. In congenial company he could take a lively share in conversation, as is proved not only by external evidence, but by his very amusing book of conversations with Northcote--an old cynic out of whom it does not seem that anybody else could strike many sparks,--or from the essay, partly historical, it is to be supposed, in which he records his celebrated discussion with Lamb, on persons whom one would wish to have seen. But perhaps some of his most characteristic performances in this line are those in which he antic.i.p.ates the modern taste for muscularity. His wayward disposition to depreciate ostensibly his own department of action, leads him to write upon the "disadvantages of intellectual superiority," and to maintain the thesis that the glory of the Indian jugglers is more desirable than that of a statesman. And perhaps the same sentiment, mingled with sheer artistic love of the physically beautiful, prompts his eloquence upon the game of fives--in which he praises the great player Cavanagh as warmly, and describes his last moments as pathetically, as if he were talking of Rousseau--and still more his immortal essay on the fight between the Gasman and Bill Neate. Prize-fighting is fortunately fallen into hopeless decay, and we are pretty well ashamed of the last flicker of enthusiasm created by Sayers and Heenan. We may therefore enjoy without remorse the prose-poem in which Hazlitt kindles with genuine enthusiasm to describe the fearful glories of the great battle. Even to one who hates the most brutalising of amus.e.m.e.nts, the spirit of the writer is impressibly contagious. We condemn, but we applaud; we are half disposed for the moment to talk the old twaddle about British pluck; and when Hazlitt"s companion on his way home pulls out of his pocket a volume of the "Nouvelle Helose," admit for a moment that "Love of the Fancy is," as the historian a.s.sures us, "compatible with a cultivation of sentiment." If Hazlitt had thrown as much into his description of the Battle of Waterloo, and had taken the English side, he would have been a popular writer. But even Hazlitt cannot quite embalm the memories of Cribb, Belcher, and Gully.

It is time, however, to stop. More might be said by a qualified writer of Hazlitt"s merits as a judge of pictures or of the stage. The same literary qualities mark all his writings. De Quincey, of course, condemns Hazlitt, as he does Lamb, for a want of "continuity." "No man can be eloquent," he says, "whose thoughts are abrupt, insulated, capricious, and nonsequacious." But then De Quincey will hardly allow that any man is eloquent except Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, and Thomas De Quincey. Hazlitt certainly does not belong to their school; nor, on the other hand, has he the plain homespun force of Swift and Cobbett. And yet readers who do not insist upon measuring all prose by the same standard, will probably agree that if Hazlitt is not a great rhetorician, if he aims at no gorgeous effects of complex harmony, he has yet an eloquence of his own. It is indeed an eloquence which does not imply quick sympathy with many moods of feeling, or an intellectual vision at once penetrating and comprehensive. It is the eloquence characteristic of a proud and sensitive nature, which expresses a very keen if narrow range of feeling, and implies a powerful grasp of one, if only one side of the truth. Hazlitt harps a good deal upon one string; but that string vibrates forcibly. His best pa.s.sages are generally an acc.u.mulation of short, pithy sentences, shaped in strong feeling, and coloured by picturesque a.s.sociation; but repeating, rather than corroborating, each other. The last blow goes home, but each falls on the same place. He varies the phrase more than the thought; and sometimes he becomes obscure, because he is so absorbed in his own feelings that he forgets the very existence of strangers who require explanation. Read through Hazlitt, and this monotony becomes a little tiresome; but dip into him at intervals, and you will often be astonished that so vigorous a writer has not left some more enduring monument of his remarkable powers.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] In the excellent Essay prefixed to "Hazlitt"s Literary Remains."

_DISRAELI"S NOVELS_[4]

It is a commonplace with men of literary eminence to extol the man of deeds above the man of words. Scott was half ashamed of scribbling novels whilst Wellington was winning battles; and, if Carlyle be a true prophet, the most brilliant writer is scarcely worthy to unloose the shoe"s latchet of the silent heroes of action. Perhaps it is graceful in masters of the art to depreciate their own peculiar function. People who have less personal interest in the matter need not be so modest. I will confess, at any rate, to preferring the men who have sown some new seed of thought above the heroes whose names mark epochs in history. I would rather make the nation"s ballads than give its laws, dictate principles than carry them into execution, and leaven a country with new ideas than translate them into facts, inevitably mangling and distorting them in the process. And therefore I would rather have written "Hamlet" than defeated the Spanish Armada; or "Paradise Lost," than have turned out the Long Parliament; or "Gray"s Elegy," than have stormed the heights of Abram; or the Waverley Novels, than have won Waterloo or even Trafalgar.

I would rather have been Voltaire or Goethe than Frederick or Napoleon; and I suspect that when the poor historian of the nineteenth century begins his superhuman work, he will, as a thorough philosopher, attribute more importance to two or three recent English writers than to all the English statesmen who have been strutting and fretting their little hour at Westminster. And therefore, too, I wish that Disraeli could have stuck to his novels instead of rising to be Prime Minister of England. This opinion is, of course, entirely independent of any judgment which may be pa.s.sed upon Disraeli"s political career. Granting that his cause has always been the right one, granting that he has rendered it essential services, I should still wish that his brilliant literary ability had been allowed to ripen undisturbed by all the worries and distractions of parliamentary existence. Persons who think the creation of a majority in the House of Commons a worthy reward for the labours of a lifetime will, of course, differ from this conclusion.

Disraeli, at any rate, ought to have agreed. No satirist has ever struck off happier portraits of the ordinary British legislator, or been more alive to the stupefying influences of a parliamentary career. We have gone through a peaceful revolution since Disraeli first sketched Rigby and Taper and Tadpole from the life; but the influences which they embodied are still as powerful, and a parliamentary atmosphere as little propitious to the pure intellect, as ever. Coningsby, if he still survives, must have lost many illusions; he must have herded with the Tapers and Tadpoles, and prompted Rigby to write slashing articles on his behalf in the quarterlies. He must have felt that his intellect was cruelly wasted in talking claptrap and plat.i.tude to suit the thick comprehensions of his party; and the huge dead weight of the invincible impenetrability to ideas of ordinary mankind must have lain heavy upon his soul. How many Tadpoles, one would like to know, still haunt the Carlton Club, or throng the ministerial benches, and how many Rigbys have forced their way into the Cabinet? That is one of the state secrets which will hardly be divulged by the only competent observer. But at any rate it is sad that the critic, who applied the lash so skilfully, should have been so unequally yoked with the objects of his contempt.

Disraeli"s talents for entertaining fiction may not indeed have been altogether wasted in his official career; but he at least may pardon admirers of his writing, who regret that he should have squandered powers of imagination, capable of true creative work, upon that alternation of truckling and bl.u.s.tering which is called governing the country.

The qualities which are of rather equivocal value in a minister of state may be admirable in the domain of literature. It is hardly desirable that the followers of a political leader should be haunted by an ever-recurring doubt as to whether his philosophical utterances express deep convictions, or the extemporised combinations of a fertile fancy, and be uncertain whether he is really putting their clumsy thoughts into clearer phrases, or foisting showy nonsense upon them for his own purposes, or simply laughing at them in his sleeve. But, in a purely literary sense, this ambiguous hovering between two meanings, this oscillation between the ironical and the serious, is always amusing, and sometimes delightful. Some simple-minded people are revolted, even in literature, by the ironical method; and tell the humorist, with an air of moral disapproval, that they never know whether he is in jest or in earnest. To such matter-of-fact persons Disraeli"s novels must be a standing offence; for it is his most characteristic peculiarity that the pa.s.sage from one phase to the other is imperceptible. He has moments of obvious seriousness; at frequent intervals comes a flash of downright sarcasm, as unmistakable in its meaning as the cut of a whip across your face; and elsewhere we have pa.s.sages which aim unmistakably, and sometimes with unmistakable success, at rhetorical excellence. But, between the two, there is a wide field where we may interpret his meaning as we please. The philosophical theory may imply a genuine belief, or may be a mere bit of conventional filling in, or perhaps a parody of his friends or himself. The gorgeous pa.s.sages may be intentionally over-coloured, or may really represent his most sincere taste. His homage may be genuine or a biting mockery. His extravagances are kept precisely at such a pitch that it is equally fair to argue that a satirist must have meant them to be absurd, or to argue only that he would have seen their absurdity in anybody else. The unfortunate critic feels himself in a position a.n.a.logous to that of the suitors in the "Merchant of Venice." He may blunder grievously, whatever alternative he selects. If he p.r.o.nounces a pa.s.sage to be pure gold, it may turn out to be merely the mask of a bitter sneer; or he may declare it to be ingenious burlesque when put forward in the most serious earnest; or may ridicule it as overstrained bombast, and find that it was never meant to be anything else. It is wiser to admit that perhaps the author was not very clear himself, or possibly enjoyed that ambiguous att.i.tude which might be interpreted according to the taste of his readers and the development of events. A man who deals in oracular utterances acquires instinctively a mode of speech which may shift its colour with every change of light. The texture of Disraeli"s writings is so ingeniously shot with irony and serious sentiment that each tint may predominate by turns. It is impossible to suppose that the weaver of so cunning a web should never have intended the effects which he produces; but frequently, too, they must be the spontaneous and partly unconscious results of a peculiar intellectual temperament. Delight in blending the pathetic with the ludicrous is the characteristic of the true humorist.

Disraeli is not exactly a humorist, but something for which the rough nomenclature of critics has not yet provided a distinctive name. His pathos is not sufficiently tender, nor his laughter quite genial enough.

The quality which results is h.o.m.ologous to, though not identical with, genuine humour: for the smile we must subst.i.tute a sneer, and the element which enters into combination with the satire is something more distantly allied to poetical unction than to glittering rhetoric. The Disraelian irony thus compounded is. .h.i.therto a unique product of intellectual chemistry.

Most of Disraeli"s novels are intended to set forth what, for want of a better name, must be called a religious or political creed. To grasp its precise meaning, or to determine the precise amount of earnestness with which it is set forth, is of course hopeless. Its essence is to be mysterious, and half the preacher"s delight is in tantalising his disciples. At moments he cannot quite suppress the amus.e.m.e.nt with which he mocks their hopeless bewilderment. When Coningsby is on the point of entering public life, he reads a speech of one of the initiated, "denouncing the Venetian const.i.tution, to the amazement of several thousand persons, apparently not a little terrified by this unknown danger, now first introduced to their notice." What more amusing than suddenly to reveal to good easy citizens that what they took for wholesome food is deadly poison, and to watch their hopeless incapacity to understand whether you are really announcing a truth or launching an epigram!

Disraeli, undoubtedly, has certain fixed beliefs which underlie and which, indeed, explain the superficial versatility of his teaching.

Amongst the various doctrines with which he plays more or less seriously, two at least are deeply rooted in his mind. He holds, with a fervour in every way honourable, a belief in the marvellous endowments of his race, and connected with this belief is an almost romantic admiration for every manifestation of intellectual power. Vivian Grey, in a bit of characteristic bombast, describes himself as "one who has worshipped the empire of the intellect;" and his career is simply an attempt to act out the principle that the world belongs of right to the cleverest. Of Sidonia, after every superlative in the language has been lavished upon his marvellous acquirements, we are told that "the only human quality that interested him was intellect." Intellect is equally, if not quite as exclusively, interesting to the creator of Sidonia. He admires it in all its forms--in a Jesuit or a leader of the International, in a charlatan or a statesman, or perhaps even more in one who combines the two characters; but the most interesting of all objects to Disraeli, if one may judge from his books, is a precocious youth, whose delight in the sudden consciousness of great abilities has not yet been dashed by experience. In some other writers we may learn the age of the author by the age of his hero. A novelist who adopts the common practice of painting from himself naturally finds out the merits of middle age in his later works. But in every one of Disraeli"s works, from "Vivian Grey" to "Lothair," the central figure is a youth, who is frequently a statesman at school, and astonishes the world before he has reached his majority. The change in the author"s position is, indeed, equally marked in a different way. The youthful heroes of Disraeli"s early novels are creative; in his later they become chiefly receptive.

Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming show their genius by insubordination; Coningsby and Tancred learn wisdom by sitting at the feet of Sidonia; and Lothair reduces himself so completely to a mere "pa.s.sive bucket" to be pumped into by every variety of teacher, that he is unpleasantly like a fool. Disraeli still loves ingenuous youth; but he has gained quite a new perception of the value of docility. Here and there, of course, there is a gentle gibe at juvenile vanity. "My opinions are already formed on every subject," says Lothair; "that is, on every subject of importance; and, what is more, they will never change." But such vanity has nothing offensive. The audacity with which a lad of twenty solves all the problems of the universe, excites in Disraeli genuine and really generous sympathy. Sidonia converts the sentiment into a theory.

Experience, he says, is less than nothing to a creative mind. "Almost everything that is great has been done by youth." The greatest captains, the greatest poets, artists, statesmen, and religious reformers of the world, have done their best work by middle life. All theories upon all subjects can be proved from history; and the great Sidonia is not to be pinned down by too literal an interpretation. But at least he is expressing Disraeli"s admiration for intellect which has the fervour, rapidity, and reckless audacity of youth, which trusts its intuitions instead of its calculations, and takes its crudest guesses for flashes of inspiration. The exuberant buoyancy of his youthful heroes gives a certain contagious charm to Disraeli"s pages, which is attractive even when verging upon extravagance. Our popular novelists have learned to a.s.sociate high spirits with muscularity; their youthful heroes are either athletes destined to put on flesh in later days, or premature prigs with serious convictions and a tendency to sermons and blue-books.

After a course of such books, Disraeli"s genuine love of talent is refreshing. He dwells fondly upon the effervescence of genius which drives men to kick over the traces of respectability and strike out short cuts to fame. If at bottom his heroes are rather eccentric than original, they have at least a righteous hatred of all bores and Philistines, and despise orthodoxy, political economy, and sound information generally. They can provide you with new theories of politics and history, as easily as Mercutio could pour out a string of similes; and we have scarcely the heart to ask whether this vivacious ebullition implies the process of fermentation by which a powerful mind clears its crude ideas, or only an imitation of the process by which superlative cleverness apes true genius. Intellect, as it becomes sobered by middle age and by scholastic training, is no longer so charming. When its guesses ossify into fixed opinions, and its arrogance takes the airs of scientific dogmatism, it is always a tiresome and may be a dangerous quality. Some indication of what Disraeli means by intellect may be found in the preface to "Lothair." Speaking of the conflict between science and the old religions, he says that it is a most flagrant fallacy to suppose that modern ages have a monopoly of scientific discovery. The greatest discoveries are not those of modern ages. "No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra, or language. What are the most brilliant of our chemical discoveries compared with the invention of fire and the metals?" Hipparchus ranks with the Keplers and Newtons; and Copernicus was but the champion of Pythagoras. To say nothing of the characteristic a.s.sumption that somebody "discovered" language and fire in the same sense as modern chem

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