His Mission.

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VIEWS AND REVIEWS

Of the early work of the greater artist a
good half is that of a man in the throes of
education: the ideas, the thoughts, the
passion, the poetry, the humour, are of the
best, but the expression is self-conscious,
strained, ignorant. Thackeray had no such
blemish. He wrote dispassionately, and he
In him there is no
was a born writer.
hesitation, no fumbling, no uncertainty. The
style of Barry Lyndon is better and stronger
and more virile than the style of Philip; and
unlike the other man's, whose latest writing
is his best, their author's evolution was
towards decay.

H

E is so superior a person that to catch him tripping is a peculiar pleasure. It is a satisfaction apart, for instance, to reflect that he has (it must be owned) a certain gentility of mind. Like the M.P. in Martin Chuzzlewit, he represents the GentleThat is his mission in manly Interest. literature, and he fulfils it thoroughly. He appears sometimes as Mr. Yellowplush, sometimes as Mr. Fitzboodle, sometimes as Michael Angelo Titmarsh, but always in the In his youth (as Gentlemanly Interest.

ever) he is found applauding the well-bred Charles de Bernard, and remarking of Balzac and Dumas that the one is 'not fit for the salon,' and the other about as genteel as a courier.' Balzac and Dumas are only men of genius and great artists: the real thing is to be 'genteel' and write-as Gerfeuil (sic) is written in a gentleman-like style.' A few pages further on in the same pronouncement (a review of Jérôme Paturot), I find him quoting with entire approval Reybaud's sketch of a great character, in whom the habitué of Paris will perhaps recognise a certain likeness to a certain celebrity of the present day, by name Monsieur Hector Berlioz, the musician and critic.' The description is too long to quote. It sparkles with all the fadaises of antiBerliozian criticism, and the point is that the hero, after conducting at a private party (which Berlioz never did) his own 'hymn of the creation that has been lost since the days of the deluge,' 'called for his cloak and his clogs, and walked home, where he wrote a critique for the newspapers of the music which he had composed and directed.' In the Gentlemanly Interest Mr. Titmarsh translates this sorry little libel with the

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VIEWS AND REVIEWS

utmost innocence of approval. It is The

Paris Sketch-Book over again. That Monsieur Hector Berlioz may possibly have known something of his trade and been withal as honest a man and artist as himself seems never to have occurred to him. He knows nothing of Monsieur Hector except that he is a 'hairy romantic,' and that whatever he wrote it was not Batti, batti; but 'Whether this that nothing is enough. little picture is a likeness or not,' he is ingenuous enough to add, 'who shall say?' But, and here speaks the bold but superior Briton-'it is a good caricature of a race in France, where geniuses poussent as they do nowhere else; where poets are prophets, where romances have revelations.' As he goes on to qualify Jérôme Paturot as a 'three volumes of 'masterpiece,' and as satire in which there is not a particle of bad blood,' it seems fair to conclude that in the Gentlemanly Interest all is considered fair, and that to accuse a man of writing criticisms on his own works is to be 'witty and entertaining,' and likewise 'careless, familiar, and sparkling' to the genteelest purpose possible in this genteelest of all possible worlds.

T

DISRAELI

O the general his novels must always be a kind of caviare; for they have no analogue in letters, but are the output of a mind and temper of singular originality. To the honest Tory, sworn to admire and unable to comprehend, they must seem inexplicable as abnormal. To the professional Radical they are so many proofs of innate inferiority for they are full of pretentiousness and affectation; they teem with examples of all manner of vices, from false English to an immoral delight in dukes; they prove their maker a trickster and a charlatan in every page. To them, however, whose first care is for rare work, the series of novels that began with Vivian Grey and ended with Endymion is one of the pleasant facts in modern letters. These books abound in wit and daring, in originality and shrewdness, in knowledge of the world and in knowledge of men; they contain many vivid and

His Novels.

striking studies of character, both portrait and caricature; they sparkle with speaking phrases and happy epithets; they are aglow with the passion of youth, the love of love, the worship of physical beauty, the admiration of whatever is costly and select and splendid—from a countess to a castle, from a duke to a diamond; they are radiant with delight in whatever is powerful or personal or attractive-from a cook to a cardinal, from an agitator to an emperor. They often remind you of Voltaire, often of Balzac, often of The Arabian Nights. You pass from an heroic drinking bout to a brilliant criticism. of style; from rhapsodies on bands and ortolans that remind you of Heine to a gambling scene that for directness and intensity may vie with the bluntest and strongest work of Prosper Mérimée; from the extravagant impudence of Popanilla to the sentimental rodomontade of Henrietta Temple; from ranting romanticism in Alroy to vivid realism in Sybil. Their author gives you no time to weary of him, for he is worldly and passionate, fantastic and trenchant, cynical and ambitious, flippant and sentimental, ornately rhetorical and triumphantly simple in a breath. He is