in The Young Duke or the 'exhausted volcanoes' paragraph in the Manchester speech.

S a rule-a rule to which there are

As

His

Speeches

ture.

some magnificent exceptions-orators as Literahave only to cease from speaking to become uninteresting. What has been heard with enthusiasm is read with indifference or even with astonishment. You miss the noble voice, the persuasive gesture, the irresistible personality; and with the emotional faculty at rest and the reason at work you are surprised and it may be a little indignant—that you should have been impressed so deeply as you were by such cold, bald verbosity as seen in black and white the masterpiece of yesterday appears to be. To some extent this is the case with these speeches of Disraeli's. At the height of debate, amid the clash of personal and party animosities, with the cheers of the orator's supporters to give them wings, they sounded greater than they were. But for all that they are vigorous and profitable yet. Their author's unfailing capacity for saying things worth heeding and remembering is proved in every one of them. It is not easy to open

The Great

Earl.

either of Mr. Kebbel's volumes without lighting upon something-a string of epigrams, a polished gibe, a burst of rhetoric, an effective collocation of words — that proclaims the artist. In this connection the perorations are especially instructive, even if you consider them simply as arrangements of sonorous and suggestive words: as oratorical impressions carefully prepared, as effects of what may be called vocalised orchestration touched off as skilfully and with as fine a sense of sound and of the sentiment to correspond as so many passages of instrumentation signed 'Berlioz' might be.

F

RUITS fail, and love dies, and time ranges; and only the whippersnapper (that fool of Time) endureth for ever. Molière knew him well, and he said that Molière was a liar and a thief. And Disraeli knew him too, and he said that in these, respects Disraeli and Molière were brothers. That he said so matters as little now as ever it did; for though the whippersnapper is immortal in kind, he is nothing if not futile and ephemeral in effect, and it was seen

without gof epirhetoric, Is - that onnection structive, arrangee words: repared, ocalised ally and

I of the

my pasBerlioz'

d time

napper

ever.

d that Disraeli these. others.

s ever

per is

futile

S seen

in

long since that in life and death Disraeli, as became his genius and his race, was the Uncommonplace incarnate, the antithesis of Grocerdom, the Satan of that revolt against the yielding habit of JehovahBottles the spirit whereof is fast coming to be our one defence against socialism and the dominion of the Common Fool. He was no sentimentalist: as what great artist government has ever been? He loved power for power's sake, and recognising to the full the law of the survival of the fittest he preferred his England to the world. He knew that it is the function of the man of genius to show that theory is only theory, and that in the House of Morality there are many mansions. To that end he lived and died; and it is not until one has comprehended the complete significance of his life and death that one is qualified to speak with understanding of such a life and death as his who passed at Khartoum.

C 2

38

VIEWS AND REVIEWS

His Components.

TH

ALEXANDRE DUMAS

as,

HE life of Dumas is not only a monument of endeavour and success, it is a sort of labyrinth as well. It abounds in pseudonyms and disguises, in sudden and unexpected appearances and retreats as unexpected and sudden, in scandals and in rumours, in mysteries and traps and ambuscades of every kind. It pleased the great man to consider himself of more importance. than any and all of the crowd of collaborators whose ideas he developed, whose raw material he wrought up into the achievement we know; and he was given to take credit to himself not only for the success and value of a particular work but for the whole thing-the work in its quiddity, so to speak, and resolved into its original elements. On the other hand, it pleased such painful creatures as MM. Quérard and Eugène de Mirecourt,' as it has since pleased Messrs. Hitchman and

Fitzgerald to consider the second- and thirdrate literary persons whom Dumas assimilated in such numbers as of greater interest and higher merit than Dumas. To them the jackals were far nobler than the lion, and they worked their hardest in the interest of the pack. It was their mission to decompose and disintegrate the magnificent entity which M. Blaze de Bury very happily nicknames 'Dumas-Légion,' and in the process not to render his own unto Cæsar but to take from him all that was Cæsar's, and divide it among the mannikins he had absorbed. And their work was in its way well done; for have we not seen M. Brunetière exulting in agreement and talking of Dumas as one less than Eugène Sue and not much bigger than Gaillardet? Of course the ultimate issue of the debate is not doubtful. Dumas remains to the end a prodigy of force and industry, a miracle of cleverness and accomplishment and ease, a type of generous and abundant humanity, a great artist in many varieties of form, a prince of talkers and story-tellers, one of the kings of the stage, a benefactor of his epoch and his kind; while of those who assisted him in the production of his