Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical Sketches Part 7

ENGLISH TORYISM AND ITS LEADERS.

Sir John Mandeville tells a story of a man who set out on a voyage of discovery, and sailing on and on in a westerly direction, at last touched a land where he was surprised to find a climate the same as his own; animals like those he had left behind; men and women not only having the same dress and complexion, but actually speaking the same language as the people of his own country. He was so struck with this unexpected and wonderful discovery, that he took to his s.h.i.+p again without delay, and sailed back eastward to impart to his own people the news that in a far-off, strange, western sea he had found a race identical with themselves. The truth was that the simple voyager had gone round the world, reached his own country without recognizing it, and then went round the world again to get home.

If the voyage were made in our time, and the explorer were a British Tory who had left England in the opening of the year 1867, and after unconsciously sailing round the world had fallen in with British Tories again in the autumn of the same year, one could easily excuse his failing to recognize his own people. For in the interval of time from February to August, British Toryism underwent the most sudden and complete transformation known outside the sphere of Ovid's Metamorphoses. If any of my American readers will try to imagine a whole political party, great in numbers, greater still in wealth, station and influence, suddenly performing just such a turn-round as the "New York Herald" accomplished at a certain early crisis of the late civil war, he will have some idea of the marvellous and unprecedented feat which was executed by the English Tories, when, renouncing all their time-honored traditions, watchwords and principles, they changed a limited and oligarchical franchise into household suffrage. It is singular, indeed, that such a thing should have been done. It is more singular still that it should have been done, as it most a.s.suredly was done, in order that one man should be kept in power. It is even more singular yet that it should have been done by a party of men individually high principled, honorable, unselfish, incapable of any deliberate meanness--and of whom many if not most actually disliked and distrusted the man in whose interest and by whose influence the surrender of principle was made.

Perhaps when I have said a little about the leaders.h.i.+p of the English Tories, the phenomenon will appear less wonderful or at least more intelligible. It was not a mere epigram which Mr. Mill uttered when he described the Tories as the stupid party. An average Tory really is a stupid man. He is a gentleman in all the ordinary acceptation of the word. He has been to Oxford or Cambridge; he has received a decent cla.s.sical education; he has travelled along the beaten tracks--made what would have been called in Mary Wortley Montague's day "the grand tour;"

he has birth and high breeding; he is a good fellow, with manly, honorable ways, and that genial consideration for the feelings of others which is the fundamental condition, the vital element of gentlemanly breeding. But he is, with all this, stupid. His mind is narrow, dull, inflexible; he cannot connect cause with effect, or see that a change is coming, or why it should come; with him _post hoc_ always means _propter hoc_; he cannot account for Goodwin Sands otherwise than because of Tenterden steeple. You cannot help liking him, and sometimes laughing at him. It may seem paradoxical, but I at least am unable to get out of my mind the conviction that there is a solid basis of stupidity in the mind of the great Conservative Chief, Lord Derby. Let me explain what I mean.

The Earl of Derby is in one sense a highly accomplished man. He is a good cla.s.sical scholar, and can make a speech in Latin. He has produced some very spirited translations from Horace; and I like his version of the Iliad better on the whole than any other I know. He is a splendid debater--Macaulay said very truly that with Lord Derby the science of debate was an instinct. He will roll out resonant, rotund, verbose sentences by the hour, by the yard; he is great at making hits and points; he has immense power of reply and repartee--of a certain easy and obvious kind; his voice is fine, his manner is n.o.ble, his invective is powerful. But he has no ideas. The light he throws out is a polarized light. He adds nothing new to the political thought of the age. I have heard many of his finest speeches; and I can remember that they were then very telling, in a Parliamentary point of view; but I cannot remember anything he said. He is always interpreting into eloquent and effective words the commonplace Philistine notions, the hereditary conventionalities of his party--and nothing more. His mind is not open to new impressions, and he is not able to appreciate the cause, the purpose or the tendency of change. This I hold to be the essential characteristic of stupidity; and this is an attribute of Lord Derby, with all his Greek, his Latin, his impetuous rhetoric, his debating skill and his audacious blunders, which sometimes almost deceive one into thinking him a man of genius. Now the Earl of Derby is the greatest Tory living; and if I have fairly described the highest type of Tory, one can easily form some conception of what the average Tory must be.

Every one likes Lord Derby, and I fully believe it to be the fact that those who know him best like him best. I cannot imagine Lord Derby doing a mean thing; I cannot imagine him haughty to a poor man, or patronizingly offensive to a timid visitor of humble birth. Look at Lord Derby through the wrong end of the intellectual telescope and you have the average British Tory. The Tory's knowledge is confined to cla.s.sics and field sports--when he knows anything. Even Lord Derby has been guilty of the most flagrant mistakes in geography and modern history.

People are never tired of alluding to a famous blunder of his about Tambov in Russia. It is also told of him that he once spoke in Parliament of Demerara as an island; and when one of his colleagues afterward remonstrated with him on the mistake, he asked with ingenuousness and _navete_ "How on earth was I to know that Demerara was not an island?" He once, at a public meeting, spoke of himself very frankly as having been born "in the pre-scientific period"--the period but too recently closed, when English Universities and high cla.s.s schools troubled themselves only about Greek and Latin, and thought it beneath their dignity to show much interest in such vulgar, practical studies as chemistry and natural history, to say nothing of that ungentlemanly and ungenerous study, the science of political economy.

The average British Tory is a Lord Derby without eloquence, brains, official habits and political experience.

How, then, do the Tories exist as a party? How do they continue to believe themselves to be Tories, and speak of themselves as Tories, when they have surrendered all, or nearly all, the great principles which are the creed and faith, and business of Toryism? Because they have, in our times, never had Tories for leaders. A man is not a Tory merely because he fights the Tory battles, any more than a captain of the Irish Brigade was a Frenchman because he fought for King Louis, or Hobart Pasha is a Turk because he commands the Ottoman navy. The Tory party has always, of late years, had to call in the aid of brilliant outsiders, political renegades, refugees from broken-down agitations, disappointed and cynical deserters from the Liberal camp, or mere adventurers, to fight their battles for them. It used to be quite a curious sight, some three or four years ago, when the Tories were, as they are now again, in opposition, to look down from the gallery of the House of Commons and see the men who did gladiatorial duty for the party. Along the back benches, above and below the "gangway," were stretched out huge at length the stalwart, handsome, manly country gentlemen, the bone and sinew of the Tory party--the only real Tories to be found in the House.

But _they_ did not bear the brunt of debate. They could cheer splendidly, and vote in platoons; but you don't suppose they were just the sort of men to confront Gladstone, and reply to Bright? Not they; and they knew it. There sat Disraeli, the brilliant renegade from Radicalism, who was ready to think for them and talk for them: and who were his lieutenants? Cairns, the successful, adroit, eloquent lawyer, a North of Ireland man, with about as much of the genuine British Tory in him as there is in Disraeli himself; Seymour Fitzgerald, the clever, pus.h.i.+ng Irishman, also a lawyer; Whiteside, the voluble, eloquent, rather boisterous advocate, also a lawyer, and also an Irishman; smart, saucy Pope Hennessy, a young Irish adventurer, who had taken up with Toryism and ultramontanism as the best way of making a career, and who would, at the slightest hint from his chief, have risen, utterly ignorant of the subject under debate, and challenged Gladstone's finance or Roundel Palmer's law. These men, and such men--these and no others--did the debating and the fighting for the great Tory party of England at a most critical period of that party's existence. Needless to say that the party who were compelled by their own poverty of idea, their own stupidity, to have these men for their representatives, were stupid enough to be led anywhere and into anything by the force of a little dexterity and daring on the part of the one man into whose hands they had confided their destinies.

In speaking, therefore, of the leaders of Toryism, I must distinctly say that I am not speaking of Tories. The rank and file are Tories; the general and officers belong to another race. Mr. Disraeli is so well known on this side of the Atlantic that I need not occupy much time or s.p.a.ce in describing him. He is the most brilliant specimen of the adventurer or political soldier of fortune known to English public life in our days. I do not suppose anybody believes Mr. Disraeli's Toryism to be a genuine faith. This is not merely because he has changed his opinions so completely since the time when he came out as a Radical, under the patronage of O'Connell, and wrote to William Johnson Fox, the Democratic orator, a famous letter, in which he, Disraeli, boasted that "his forte was revolution." Men have changed their views as completely, and even as suddenly, and yet obtained credit for sincerity and integrity. It is not even because, in all of Mr. Disraeli's novels, a prime and favorite personage is a daring political adventurer, who carries all before him by the audacity of his genius and his unscrupulousness; it is not even that Mr. Disraeli, in private life, frequently speaks of success in politics as the one grand object worth striving for or living for. "What do you and I come to this House of Commons night after night for?" said Mr. Disraeli once to a great Englishman, and when the latter failed to reply very quickly, he answered his own question by saying, "You know we come here for fame."

The man to whom he spoke declared, in all truthfulness, that he did not follow a political career for the sake of fame. But Disraeli was quite incredulous, and probably could not, by any earnestness and apparent sincerity of a.s.severation, be got to believe that there lives a being who could sacrifice time, and money, and intellect, and eloquence merely for the sake of serving the public. Yet it is not alone this cynical avowal of selfishness which makes people so profoundly sceptical as to Mr. Disraeli's Toryism. It is the fact that he always escapes into Liberalism whenever he has an opportunity; that he lives by hawking Toryism, not by imbibing it himself; that he is ready to sell it, or betray it, or drag it in the dirt whenever he can safely serve himself by doing so; that he can become the most ardent of Freetraders, the most uncompromising champion of a Popular Suffrage to-day, when it is for his interest, after having fought fiercely against both yesterday, when to fight against them was for his interest. Mr. Disraeli is decidedly a man without scruple. Those who have read his "Vivian Grey" will remember with what zest and unction he describes his hero bewildering a company and dumbfoundering a scientific authority by extemporizing an imaginary quotation from a book which he holds in his hand, and from which he pretends to read the pa.s.sage he is reciting. It is not long since Mr.

Disraeli himself publicly ventured on a bold little experiment of a somewhat similar kind. The story is curious, and worth hearing; and it is certain that it cannot be contradicted.

Three or four years ago, a bitter factious attack was made in the House of Commons upon Mr. Stansfeld, then holding office in the Liberal government, because of his open and avowed friends.h.i.+p for, and intimacy with Mazzini. This was at a time when the French government were endeavoring to connect Mazzini with a plot to a.s.sa.s.sinate the Emperor Napoleon. Mr. Disraeli was very stern in his condemnation of Mr.

Stansfeld for his friends.h.i.+p with one who, twenty odd years before, had encouraged a young enthusiast (as the enthusiast said) in a design to kill Charles Albert, King of Sardinia. Mr. Bright, in a moderate and kindly speech, deprecated the idea of making unpardonable crimes out of the hotheaded follies of enthusiastic men in their young days; and he added that he believed there would be found in a certain poem, written by Disraeli himself some twenty-five or thirty years before, and called "A Revolutionary Epick," some lines of eloquent apostrophe in praise of tyrannicide. Up sprang Mr. Disraeli, indignant and excited, and vehemently denied that any such sentiment, any such line, could be found in the poem. Mr. Bright at once accepted the a.s.surance; said he had never seen the poem himself, but only heard that there was such a pa.s.sage in it; apologized for the mistake--and there most people thought the matter would have ended. In truth, the volume which Mr. Disraeli had published a generation before, with the grandiloquent t.i.tle, "A Revolutionary Epick" (not "epic," in the common way, but dignified, old-fas.h.i.+oned "epick"), was a piece of youthful, bombastic folly long out of print, and almost wholly forgotten. But Disraeli chose to attach great importance to the charge he supposed to be made against him; and he declared that he felt himself bound to refute it utterly by more than a mere denial. Accordingly, in a few weeks, there came out a new edition of the Epick, with a dedication to Lord Stanley, and a preface explaining that, as the first edition was out of print, and as a charge founded on a pa.s.sage in it had been made against the author, said author felt bound to issue this new edition, that all the world might see how unfounded was the accusation. Sure enough, the publication did seem to dispose of the charge effectually. There was only one pa.s.sage which in any way bore on the subject of tyrannicide, and that certainly did not express approval. What could be more satisfactory? Unluckily, however, the gentleman on whose hint Mr. Bright spoke, happened to possess one copy of the original edition. He compared this, to make a.s.surance doubly sure, with the copy at the British Museum, the only other copy accessible to him, and he found that the pa.s.sage which contained the praise of tyrannicide had been partly altered, partly suppressed, in the new edition specially issued by Mr. Disraeli, in order to prove to the world that he had not written a line in the poem to imply that he sanctioned the slaying of a tyrant. Now, this was a small and trifling affair; but just see how significant and characteristic it was! It surely did not make much matter whether Mr. Disraeli, in his young, nonsensical days, had or had not indulged in a burst of enthusiasm about the slaying of tyrants, in a poem so bombastical that no rational man could think of it with any seriousness. But Mr. Disraeli chose to regard his reputation as seriously a.s.sailed; and what did he do to vindicate himself? He published a new edition, which he trumpeted as not merely authentic, but as issued for the sole purpose of proving that he had not praised tyrannicide, and he deliberately excised the lines which contained the pa.s.sage in question! The controversy turned on some two lines and a half; and of these Mr. Disraeli cut out all the dangerous words and gave the garbled version to the world as his authoritative reply to the charge made against him! This, too, after the famous "annexation" of one of Thiers's speeches, and the delivery of it as a panegyric on the memory of the Duke of Wellington, and after the appropriation of a page or two out of an essay by Macaulay, and its introduction wholesale, as original, into one of Mr. Disraeli's novels.

The truth is that Disraeli is so reckless a gladiator that he will catch up any weapon of defence, use any means of evasion and escape; will fight anyhow, and win anyhow. In political affairs, at least, he has no moral sense whatever; and the public seems to tolerate him on that understanding. Certainly, escapades and practices which would ruin the reputation of any other public man do not seem to bring Disraeli into serious disrepute. The few high-toned men of his own party and the other who hold all trickery in detestation, had made up their minds about him long ago; and nothing could hurt him more in their esteem--the great majority of politicians laugh at the whole thing, and take no thought.

The feeling seems to be, "We don't expect grave and severe virtue from this man; we take him as he is. It would be ridiculous to apply a grave moral test to anything he may say or do." In Lockhart's "Life of Walter Scott," it is told that the great novelist went one morning very early to call on a certain friend. The friend was in bed, and Scott, pus.h.i.+ng into the room familiarly, found that his friend was--not alone, as he expected him to be. Scott was a highly moral man, and he would have turned his back indignantly on any other of his friends whom he found guilty of vice; but his biographer says that he took the discovery he had made very lightly in this instance; and he afterward explained that the delinquent was so ridiculously without depth of character it would be absurd to find serious fault with anything he did. Perhaps it is in a similar spirit that the British public regard Mr. Disraeli. He delivered a memorable peroration one night last year in the House of Commons, the utterance and the language of which were so peculiar that charity itself could not affect to be ignorant of the stimulating cause which sent forth such extraordinary eloquence. Yet hardly anybody seemed to regard it as more than a good joke; and the newspapers which were most indignant and most scandalized over Andrew Johnson's celebrated inaugural address made no allusion whatever to Mr. Disraeli's bewildering outburst. One reason, probably, is that Disraeli, in private, is much liked. He is very kindly; he is a good friend; he is sympathetic in his dealings with young politicians, and is always glad to give a helping hand to a young man of talent. Personal ambition, which, in Mr. Bright's eyes, is something despicable, and which Mr.

Gladstone probably regards as a sin, is, in Disraeli's acceptation, something generous and elevating, something to be fostered and encouraged. Therefore, young men of talent admire Disraeli, and are glad and proud to gather round him. The men who have any brains in the Tory ranks are usually of the adventurer cla.s.s; and they form a phalanx by the aid of which Disraeli can do great things. No matter how the honest, dull bulk of his party may distrust him, they cannot do without him and his phalanx; and they allow him to win his battles by the force of their votes, and they think he is winning their battles all the time.

One young man of brains there was on the Tory side of the House of Commons, who did not like Disraeli, and never professed to like him.

This was Lord Robert Cecil, who subsequently became Viscount Cranbourne, and now sits in the House of Lords as Marquis of Salisbury. Lord Robert Cecil was by far the ablest scion of n.o.ble Toryism in the House of Commons. Younger than Lord Stanley he had not Lord Stanley's solidity and caution; but he had much more of original ability; he had brilliant ideas, great readiness in debate, and a perfect genius for saying bitter things in the bitterest tone. The younger son of a wealthy peer, he had, in consequence of a dispute with his father, manfully accepted honorable poverty, and was glad, for no short time, to help out his means by the use of his pen. He wrote in the "Quarterly Review," the time-honored organ of Toryism; and after a while certain political articles regularly appearing in that periodical became identified with his name. One great object of these articles seemed to be to denounce Mr. Disraeli and warn the Tory party against him as a traitor, certain in the end to sell and surrender their principles. Lord Robert Cecil was an ultra-Tory--or at least thought himself so--I feel convinced that his intellect and his experience will set him free one day. He was a Tory on principle and would listen to no compromise. People did not at first see how much ability there was in him--very few indeed saw how much of genuine manhood and n.o.bleness there was in him. His tall, bent, awkward figure; his prematurely bald crown, his face with an outline and a beard that reminded one of a Jew pedler from the Minories, his ungainly gestures, his unmelodious voice, and the extraordinary and wanton bitterness of his tongue, set the ordinary observer strongly against him. He seemed to delight in being gratuitously offensive. Let me give one ill.u.s.tration.

He a.s.sailed Mr. Gladstone's financial policy one night, and said it was like the practice of a pettifogging attorney. This was rather coa.r.s.e and it was received with loud murmurs of disapprobation, but Lord Robert went on unheeding. Next night, however, when the debate was resumed, he rose and said he feared he had used language the previous evening which was calculated to give offence, and which he could not justify. There were murmurs of encouraging applause--nothing delights the House of Commons like an unsolicited and manly apology. Yes, he had, on the previous night, in a moment of excitement, compared the policy of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to the practice of a pettifogging attorney.

That was language which on sober consideration he felt he could not justify and ought not to have used, "and therefore," said Lord Robert, "I beg leave to offer my sincere apology"--here Mr. Gladstone half rose from his seat, with face of eager generosity, ready to pardon even before fully asked--"I beg leave to tender my sincere apology--to the attorneys!" Half the House roared with laughter, the other half with anger--and Gladstone threw himself back in his seat with an expression of mingled disappointment, pity and scorn, on his pallid, n.o.ble features.

There was something so wanton, something so nearly approaching to outrageous buffoonery, in conduct like this, on the part of Lord Robert Cecil, that it was long before impartial observers came to recognize the fine intellect and the manly character that were disguised under such an unprepossessing exterior. When the Tories came into power, the great place of Secretary for India was given to Lord Robert, who had then become Viscount Cranbourne, and the responsibilities of office wrought as complete a change in him as the wearing of the crown did in Harry the Fifth. No man ever displayed in so short a time greater apt.i.tude for the duties of the office he had undertaken, or a loftier sense of its tremendous moral and political responsibility, than did Lord Cranbourne during his too brief tenure of the Indian Secretarys.h.i.+p. The cynic had become a statesman, the intellectual gladiator an earnest champion of exalted political principle. The license of tongue, in which Lord Cranbourne had revelled while yet a free lance, he absolutely renounced when he became a responsible minister. He extorted the respect and admiration of Gladstone and Bright, and indeed of every one who took the slightest interest in the condition and the future of India. The manner of his leaving office became him, too, almost as much as his occupation of it. He was sincerely opposed to a sudden lowering of the franchise, and he insisted that his party ought to think nothing of power when compared with principle. He found that Disraeli was determined to surrender anything rather than power, and he withdrew from the uncongenial companions.h.i.+p. He resigned office, and dropped into the ranks once more, never hesitating to express his conviction of the utter insincerity of the Conservative leader. He would have been a sharp and stinging thorn in Disraeli's side, only that death intervened and took away, not him, but his father. The death of his elder brother had made Lord Robert Cecil, Viscount Cranbourne; the death of his father now converted Viscount Cranbourne into the Marquis of Salisbury, and condemned him to the languid, inert, lifeless atmosphere of the House of Peers. The sincere pity of all who admired him followed the brilliant Salisbury in his melancholy descent. I should despair of conveying to an American reader unacquainted with English politics any adequate idea of the profundity and hopelessness of the fall which precipitates a young, ardent and gifted politician from the brilliant battle-ground of the House of Commons into the lifeless, Lethean pool of the House of Lords.

Still, the Tory party may be led, as it has been, by a chief in the House of Lords, although its great and splendid fights must be fought in the Commons. If then, in our time, Toryism ever should again become a principle which a man of genius and high character could fairly fight for, it has a leader ready to its hand in the Marquis of Salisbury. For the present it has Lord Cairns. The Earl of Derby's health no longer allows him to undertake the serious and laborious duties of party leaders.h.i.+p. When he withdrew from the front, an attempt was made to put up with Lord Malmesbury. But Malmesbury is stupid and muddle-headed to a degree which even Tory peers cannot endure in a Tory peer; and it has somehow been "borne in upon him" that he had better leave the place to some one really qualified to fill it. Now, the Tories in the House of Commons, the country gentlemen of England, the men whose ancestors came over, perhaps, with the Conqueror, the men who imbibed family Toryism from the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of their mothers, are driven, when they want a capable leader, to follow a renegade Radical, the son of a middle-cla.s.s Jew. In like manner the Tory Lords, also sadly needing an efficient leader, are compelled to take up with a lawyer from Belfast, the son of middle-cla.s.s parents in the North of Ireland, who has fought his way by sheer talent and energy into the front rank of the bar, into the front bench of the Parliamentary Opposition, and at last into a peerage. Lord Cairns is a very capable man; his sudden rise into high place and influence proves the fact of itself, for he was not a young man when he entered Parliament, obscure and unknown, and he is now only in the prime of life, while he leads the Opposition in the House of Lords. He is one of the most fluent and effective debaters in either House; he has great command of telling argument; his training at the bar gives him the faculty of making the very most, and at the shortest notice, of all the knowledge and all the facts he can bring to bear on any question. He has shown more than once that he is capable of pouring forth a powerful, almost indeed, a pa.s.sionate invective. An orator in the highest sense he certainly is not. No gleam of the poetic softens or brightens his lithe and nervous logic; no deep feeling animates, inspires and sanctifies it.

He has made no speeches which anybody hereafter will care to read. He has made, he will make, no mark upon his age. When he dies, he wholly dies. But living, he is a skilful and a capable man--far better qualified to be a party leader than an Erskine or a Grattan would be. A North of Ireland Presbyterian, he has made his way to a peerage, and now to be the leader of peers, with less of native genius than that which conducted Wolfe Tone, another North of Ireland Presbyterian, to rebellion and failure and a b.l.o.o.d.y death. He has, above all things, skill and discretion; and he can lead the Tory party well, so long as no great cause has to be vindicated, no splendid phantom of a principle maintained. His name and his antecedents are useful to us now, inasmuch as they serve still farther to ill.u.s.trate the fact that Toryism is not led by Tories.

In speaking of Tory leaders one ought not, of course, to leave out the name of Lord Stanley. But Lord Stanley is only a Tory _ex officio_, and by virtue of his position as the eldest son and heir of the great Earl of Derby. I have never heard of Lord Stanley's uttering a Tory sentiment, even when he had to play a Tory part. His speeches are all the speeches of a steady, respectable, thoughtful sort of Liberal, inclined to study carefully both or all sides of a question, and opposed to extreme opinions either way. He will never, it is quite clear, be guilty of the audacity of openly breaking with his party while his father lives; and perhaps when he becomes Earl of Derby, there may be nothing distinctively Tory worth fighting about. Lord Stanley is indeed totally devoid of that generous ardor which makes men open converts. He is no longer young, and he will probably remain all his life where he stands at present. But a genuine Tory he is not. I confess that at one time I looked to him with great hope, as a man likely to develop into statesmans.h.i.+p of the highest order, and to announce himself as a votary of political and intellectual progress. Some years ago I wrote an article in the "Westminster Review," the object of which was to point to Lord Stanley as the future colleague of Gladstone in a great and a really liberal government. I have changed my opinion since. Lord Stanley wants, not the brains, but the heart for such a place. He has not the spirit to step out of his hereditary way. He is one of the sort of men of whom Goethe used to say, "If only they would commit an extravagance even, I should have some hope for them." He seems to care for little beyond accuracy of judgment and propriety; and I do not suppose accuracy of judgment and propriety ever made a great statesman. There is nothing venturesome about Lord Stanley--therefore there is nothing great. A man to be great must brave being ridiculous; and I do not remember that Lord Stanley has ever run the risk of being ridiculous. One of the finest and most celebrated pa.s.sages of modern Parliamentary eloquence is that in which George Canning, vindicating his recognition of the South American republics, proclaimed that he had called in the New World to redress the balance of the Old. I once heard a member of the House of Lords, now dead, who sat in the House of Commons near Canning, when Canning spoke that famous speech, say that when the orator came to the great climax the House was actually breaking into a t.i.tter, so absurd then did any grandiloquence about South American republics seem; and it was only the earnestness and resolve of his manner that commanded a respectful attention, and thus compelled the House to recognize the genuine grandeur of the idea, and to break into a tempest of applause. I have heard something the same told of one of the grandest pa.s.sages in any of Bright's speeches--that in one of his orations against the Crimean War, in which he declared that he already heard, during the debate, the beating of the wings of the Angel of Death. The House was under the influence of a war fever, and disposed to scoff at all appeals to prudence or to pity; and it was just on the verge of a laugh at the orator's majestic apostrophe, when his earnestness conquered, the grandeur of the moment was recognized, and a peal of irrepressible applause proclaimed the triumph of his eloquence. Now, these are the risks that a man like Lord Stanley never will run. Only genius makes such ventures. He is always safe: great statesmen must sometimes brave terrible hazards. In England he has received immense praise for the part he took in averting a war between France and Prussia on the Luxembourg question. Now, it is quite true that he did much; that, in fact, he lent all the influence of England to the mode of arrangement by which both the contending Powers were enabled to back decently out of a dangerous and painful position. But the idea of such a mode of settlement did not come from him. It was originated by Baron von Beust, the Austrian Prime Minister, and it was quietly urged a good deal before Lord Stanley saw it. Von Beust, who has a keener wit than Stanley, knew that if the proposition came directly from him it would, _ipso facto_, be odious to Prussia; and he was, therefore, rejoiced when Lord Stanley took it up and adopted it as his own and England's. Von Beust was well content, and so was Lord Stanley--just as Cuddie Headrigg, in "Old Mortality," is content that John Gudyill shall have the responsibility and the honor of the shot which the latter never fired. The one original thing which Lord Stanley did during the controversy was to write a dispatch to Prussia recommending her to come to terms, because of the superior navy of France, and the certainty, in the event of war, that France would have the best of it at sea.

Now, this was a capital argument to influence a man like Lord Stanley himself--calm, cold-blooded, utterly rational. But human ingenuity could hardly have devised an appeal less likely to influence Prussia in the way of peace. Prussia, flushed with her splendid victories over Austria, and deeply offended by the arrogant and dictatorial conduct of France, was much more likely to be stung by such an argument, if it affected her at all, into flinging down the gauntlet at once, and inviting France to come if she dared. The use of such a mode of persuasion is, indeed, an adequate ill.u.s.tration of the whole character of Lord Stanley. Cool, prudent, and rational, he is capable enough of weighing things fairly when they are presented to him; but he can neither create an opportunity nor run a risk. Therefore, he remains officially a Tory, mentally a Liberal, politically neither the one nor the other. His bones are marrowless, his blood is cold. He can forfeit his own career, and hazard his reputation for his party; but that is all. He cannot give his mind to it, and he cannot redeem himself from his futile bondage to it. He is a respectable speaker, despite his defective articulation and his lifeless manner; he will be a respectable politician, despite his want of faith in, or zeal for the cause he tries to follow. That is his career; that is the doom to which he voluntarily condemns himself.

I do not know that there are any other Tory chiefs worth talking about.

Sir Stafford Northcote looks like a Bonn or Heidelberg professor, and has a fair average intellect, fit for commonplace finance and elementary politics; there is not a ghost of an idea in him. Walpole is a pompous, well-meaning, gentlemanlike imbecile. Gathorne Hardy is fluent, as the sand in an hourgla.s.s is fluent--he can pour out words and serve to mark the pa.s.sing of time. Sir John Pakington is an educated Dogberry, a respectable Justice Shallow. Not upon men like these do the political fortunes of the Tory party of our day depend, although Walpole and Pakington fairly represent the sincerity, the manhood, and the respectability of Toryism.

I come back to the point from which I started--that Toryism, in itself, is only another word for stupidity, and that any triumphs the party have won or may win are secured by the surrender of the principle they profess to be fighting for, and by the skilful management of men whose conscience permits them to adapt the means unscrupulously to the end.

Were the Tory party led by genuine Tories it would have been extinct long ago. It lives and looks upon the earth, it has its triumphs and its gains, its present and its future, only because by very virtue of its own dulness it has allowed itself to be led by men whom it ought to detest, whom it sometimes does distrust, but who have the wit to sell principle in the dearest market, and buy reputation in the cheapest.

"GEORGE ELIOT" AND GEORGE LEWES.

Literary reputations are, in one respect, like wines--some are greatly improved by a long voyage, while others lose all zest and strength in the process of crossing the ocean. There ought to be hardly any difference, one would think, between the literary taste of the public of London and that of the public of New York; and yet it is certain that an author or a book may be positively celebrated in the one city and only barely known and coldly recognized in the other. Every one, of course, has noticed the fact that certain English authors are better known and appreciated in New York than in London; certain American writers more talked of in London than in New York. The general public of England do not seem to me to appreciate the true position of Whittier and Lowell among American poets. The average Englishman knows hardly anything of any American poet but Longfellow, who receives, I venture to think, a far more wholesale and enthusiastic admiration in England than in his own country. Robert Buchanan, the Scottish poet, lately, I have read, described "Evangeline" as a far finer poem than Goethe's "Hermann und Dorothea," a judgment which I presume and hope it would be impossible to get any American scholar and critic to indorse or even to consider seriously. On the other hand, it is well known that both the Brownings--certainly Mrs. Browning--found quicker and more cordial appreciation in America than in England. Lately, we in London have taken to discussing and debating over Walt Whitman with a warmth and interest which people in New York do not seem to manifest in regard to the author of "Leaves of Gra.s.s." Charles d.i.c.kens appears to me to have more devoted admirers among the best cla.s.s of readers here than he has in his own country. Of course, it would be hardly possible for any man to be more popular and more successful than d.i.c.kens is in England; but New York journals quote him and draw ill.u.s.trations from him much more frequently than London papers do--I do not think any day has pa.s.sed since first I came to this country, six or seven months ago, that I have not seen at least two or three allusions to d.i.c.kens in the leading articles of the daily papers--and I question whether, among critics standing as high in London as George William Curtis does here, d.i.c.kens could find the enthusiastic, the almost lyrical devotion of Curtis's admiration.

Charles Reade, again, is more generally and warmly admired here than in England. Am I wrong in supposing that the reverse is the case with regard to the auth.o.r.ess of "Romola" and "The Mill on the Floss?" All American critics and all American readers of taste, have doubtless testified practically their recognition of the genius of this extraordinary woman; but there seems to me to be relatively less admiration for her in New York than in London. The general verdict of English criticism would, I feel no doubt, place George Eliot on a higher pedestal than Charles d.i.c.kens. We regard her as belonging to a higher school of art, as more nearly affined to the great immortal few whose genius and fame transcend the fas.h.i.+on of the age and defy the caprice of public taste. So far as I have been able to observe, I do not think this is the opinion of American criticism.

In any case, the mere question will excuse my writing a few pages about a woman whom I regard as the greatest living novelist of England; as, on the whole, the greatest woman now engaged in European literature. Only George Sand and Harriet Martineau could fairly be compared with her; and, while Miss Martineau, of course, is far inferior in all the higher gifts of imagination and the higher faculties of art, George Sand, with all her pa.s.sion, her rich fancy, and daring, subtle a.n.a.lysis of certain natures, has never exhibited the serene, symmetrical power displayed in "Romola" and in "Silas Marner." Mrs. Lewes (it would be affectation to try to a.s.sume that there is still any mystery about the ident.i.ty of "George Eliot") is what George Sand is not--a great writer, merely as a writer. Few, indeed, are the beings who have ever combined so many high qualities in one person as Mrs. Lewes does. Her literary career began as a translator and an essayist. Her tastes seemed then to lead her wholly into the somewhat barren fields where German metaphysics endeavor to come to the relief or the confusion of German theology. She became a contributor to the "Westminster Review;" then she became its a.s.sistant editor, and worked a.s.siduously for it under the direction of Dr. John Chapman, the editor, with whose family she lived for a time, and in whose house she first met George Henry Lewes. She is an accomplished linguist, a brilliant talker, a musician of extraordinary skill. She has a musical sense so delicate and exquisite that there are tender, simple, true ballad melodies which fill her with a pathetic pain almost too keen to bear; and yet she has the firm, strong command of tone and touch, without which a really scientific musician cannot be made. I do not think this exceeding sensibility of nature is often to be found in combination with a genuine mastery of the practical science of music.

But Mrs. Lewes has mastered many sciences as well as literatures.

Probably no other novel writer, since novel writing became a business, ever possessed one t.i.the of her scientific knowledge. Indeed, hardly anything is rarer than the union of the scientific and the literary or artistic temperaments. So rare is it, that the exceptional, the almost solitary instance of Goethe comes up at once, distinct and striking, to the mind. English novelists are even less likely to have anything of a scientific taste than French or German. d.i.c.kens knows nothing of science, and has, indeed, as little knowledge of any kind, save that which is derived from observation, as any respectable Englishman could well have. Thackeray was a man of varied reading, versed in the lighter literature of several languages, and strongly imbued with artistic tastes; but he had no care for science, and knew nothing of it but just what every one has to learn at school. Lord Lytton's science is a mere sham. Charlotte Bronte was all genius and ignorance. Mrs. Lewes is all genius and culture. Had she never written a page of fiction, nay, had she never written a line of poetry or prose, she must have been regarded with wonder and admiration by all who knew her as a woman of vast and varied knowledge; a woman who could think deeply and talk brilliantly, who could play high and severe cla.s.sical music like a professional performer, and could bring forth the most delicate and tender aroma of nature and poetry lying deep in the heart of some simple, old-fas.h.i.+oned Scotch or English ballad. Nature, indeed, seemed to have given to this extraordinary woman all the gifts a woman could ask or have--save one.

It will not, I hope, be considered a piece of gossipping personality if I allude to a fact which must, some day or other, be part of literary history. Mrs. Lewes is not beautiful. In her appearance there is nothing whatever to attract admiration. Hers is not even a face like that of Charlotte Cushman, which, at least, must make a deep impression, and seize at once the attention of the gazer. Nor does it seem, like that of Madame de Stael or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, informed and illuminated by the light of genius. Mrs. Lewes is what we in England call decidedly plain--what people in New York call homely; and what persons who did not care to soften the force of an unpleasant truth would describe probably by a still harder and more emphatic adjective.

This woman, thus rarely gifted with poetry and music and imagination--thus disciplined in man's highest studies and accustomed to the most laborious of man's literary drudgery--does not seem to have found out, until she had pa.s.sed what is conventionally regarded as the age of romance, that she had in her, transcendent above all other gifts, the faculty of the novelist. When an author who is not very young makes a great hit at last, we soon begin to learn that he had already made many attempts in the same direction, and his publishers find an eager demand for the stories and sketches which, when they first appeared, utterly failed to attract attention. Thackeray's early efforts, Trollope's, Charles Reade's, Nathaniel Hawthorne's, all these have been lighted into success by the blaze of the later triumph. But it does not seem that Miss Marion Evans, as she then was, ever published anything in the way of fiction previous to the series of sketches which appeared in "Blackwood's Magazine," and were called "Scenes of Clerical Life." These sketches attracted considerable attention, and were much admired; but I do not think many people saw in them the capacity which produced "Adam Bede" and "Romola." With the publication of "Adam Bede" came a complete triumph. The author was elevated at once and by acclamation to the highest rank among living novelists. I think it was in the very first number of the "Cornhill Magazine" that Thackeray, in a gossiping paragraph about novelists of the day, whom he mentioned alphabetically and by their initials, spoke of "E" as a "star of the first magnitude just risen on the horizon." Thackeray, it will be remembered, was one of the first, if not, indeed, the very first, to recognize the genius manifested in "Jane Eyre." The publishers sent him some of the proof sheets for his advice, and Thackeray saw in them the work of a great novelist.

The place which Mrs. Lewes thus so suddenly won, she has, of course, always maintained. Her position of absolute supremacy over all other women writers in England is something peculiar and curious. She is first--and there is no second. No living auth.o.r.ess in Britain is ever now compared with her. I read, not long since, in a New York paper, a sentence which spoke of George Eliot and Miss Mulock as being the greatest English auth.o.r.esses in the field of fiction. It seemed very odd and funny to me. Certainly, an English critic would never have thought of bracketing together such a pair. Miss Mulock is a graceful, true-hearted, good writer; but Miss Mulock and George Eliot! Robert Lytton and Robert Browning! "A. K. H. B." (I think these are the initials) and John Stuart Mill! Mark Lemon's novels and Charles d.i.c.kens's! Mrs. Lewes has made people read novels who perhaps never read fiction from any other pen. She has made the novel the companion and friend and study of scholars and thinkers and statesmen. Her books are discussed by the gravest critics as productions of the highest school of art. Men and journals which have always regarded, or affected to regard, Thackeray as a mere cynic, and d.i.c.kens as little better than a professional buffoon, have discussed "The Mill on the Floss" and "Romola" as if these novels were already cla.s.sic. Of course it would be a very doubtful kind of merit which commanded the admiration of literary prigs or pedants; but that is not the merit of George Eliot. Her books find their way to all hearts and intelligences, but it is their peculiarity that they compel, they extort the admiration of men who would disparage all novels, if they could, as frivolous and worthless, but who are forced even by their own canons and principles to recognize the deep clear thought, the n.o.ble culture, the penetrating, a.n.a.lytical power, which are evident in almost every chapter of these stories. Most of our novelists write in a slipslop, careless style. d.i.c.kens is worthless, if regarded merely as a prose writer; Trollope hardly cares about grammar; Charles Reade, with all his masculine force and clearness, is terribly irregular and rugged. The woman writers have seldom any style at all. George Eliot's prose might be the study of a scholar anxious to acquire and appreciate a n.o.ble English style. It is as luminous as the language of Mill; far more truly picturesque than that of Ruskin; capable of forcible, memorable expression as the robust Saxon of Bright. I am not going into a criticism of George Eliot, who has been, no doubt, fully criticised in America already. I am merely engaged in pointing out the special reasons why she has won in England a certain kind of admiration which, it seems to me, hardly any novelist ever has had before. I think she has infused into the novel some elements it never had before, and so thoroughly infused them that they blend with all the other materials, and do not form anywhere a solid lump or ma.s.s distinguishable from the rest. There are philosophical novels--"Wilhelm Meister," for example--which are weighed down and loaded with the philosophy, and which the world admires in spite of the philosophy. There are political novels--Disraeli's, for instance--which are only intelligible to those who make politics and political personalities a study, and which viewed merely as stories would not be worth speaking about. There are novels with a great direct purpose in them, such as "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or "Bleak House," or Charles Reade's "Hard Cash;" but these, after all, are only magnificent pamphlets, splendidly ill.u.s.trated diatribes. The deep philosophic thought of George Eliot's novels suffuses and illumines them everywhere. You can point to no sermon here, no lecture there, no solid ma.s.s interposing between this incident and that, no ponderous moral hung around the neck of this or that personage. Only you feel that you are under the control of one who is not merely a great story-teller but who is also a deep thinker.

It is not, perhaps, unnecessary to say to American readers that George Eliot is the only novelist who can paint such English people as the Poysers and the Tullivers just as they really are. She looks into the very souls of these people. She tracks out their slow peculiar mental processes; she reproduces them fresh and firm from very life. Mere realism, mere photographing, even from the life, is not in art a very great triumph. But George Eliot can make her dullest people interesting and dramatically effective. She can paint two dull people with quite different ways of dulness--say a dull man and a dull woman, for example--and you are astonished to find how utterly distinct the two kinds of stupidity are--and how intensely amusing both can be made. Look at the two pedantic, pompous, dull advocates in the later part of Robert Browning's "The Ring and the Book." How distinct they are; how different, how unlike, and how true, are the two portraits. But then it must be owned that the poet is himself terribly tedious just there. His pedants are quite as tiresome as they would be in real life, if each successively held you by the b.u.t.ton. George Eliot never is guilty of this great artistic fault. You never want to be rid of Mrs. Poyser or Aunt Glegg, or the prattling Florentines in "Romola." It is almost superfluous to say that there never was or could be a Mark Tapley, or a Sam Weller. We put up with these impossibilities and delight in them, because they are so amusing and so full of fantastic humor. But Mrs.

Poyser lives, and I have met Aunt Glegg often; and poor Mrs. Tulliver's cares and hopes, and little fears, and pitiful reasonings, are animating scores of Mrs. Tullivers all over England to-day. I would propose a safe and easy test to any American or other "foreigner" (I am supposing myself now again in England), who is curious to know how much he understands of the English character. Let him read any of George Eliot's novels--even "Felix Holt," which is so decidedly inferior to the rest--and if he fails to follow, with thorough appreciation, the talk and the ways of the Poysers and such like personages, he may be a.s.sured he does not understand one great phase of English life.

Are these novels popular in England? Educated public opinion, I repeat, ranks them higher than the novels of any other living author. But they are not popular--that is, as Wilkie Collins or Miss Braddon is popular; and I do not mean to say anything slighting of either Wilkie Collins or Miss Braddon, both of whom I think possess very great talents, and have been treated with quite too much of the _de haut en bas_ mood of the great critics. George Eliot's novels certainly are not run after and devoured by the average circulating library readers, as "The Woman in White," and "Lady Audley's Secret" were. She has, of course, nothing like the number of readers who follow Charles d.i.c.kens; nor even, I should say, nearly as many as Anthony Trollope. When "Romola," which the "Sat.u.r.day Review" justly p.r.o.nounced to be, if not the greatest, certainly the n.o.blest romance of modern days, was being published as a serial in the "Cornhill Magazine," it was comparatively a failure, in the circulating library sense; and even when it appeared in its complete form, and the public could better appreciate its artistic perfection, it was anything but a splendid success, as regarded from the publisher's point of view. Perhaps this may be partly accounted for by the nature of the subject, the scene and the time; but even the warmest admirer of George Eliot may freely admit that "Romola" lacks a little of that pa.s.sionate heat which is needed to make a writer of fiction thoroughly popular. When a statue of pure and perfect marble attracts as great a crowd of gazers as a glowing picture, then a novel like "Romola" will have as many admirers as a novel like "Consuelo" or "Villette."

I am not one of the admirers of George Eliot who regret that she ventured on the production of a long poem. I think "The Spanish Gypsy" a true and a fine poem, although I do not place it so high in artistic rank as the best of the author's prose writings. But I believe it to be the greatest story in verse ever produced by an Englishwoman. This is not, perhaps, very high praise, for Englishwomen have seldom done much in the higher fields of poetry; but we have "Aurora Leigh;" and I think "The Spanish Gypsy," on the whole, a finer piece of work. Most of our English critics fell to discussing the question whether "The Spanish Gypsy" was to be regarded as poetry at all, or only as a story put into verse; and in this futile and vexatious controversy the artistic value of the work itself almost escaped a.n.a.lysis. I own that I think criticism shows to little advantage when it occupies itself in considering whether a work of art is to be called by this name or that; and I am rather impatient of the critic who comes with his canons of art, his Thirty-Nine articles of literary dogma, and judges a book, not by what it is in itself, but by the answer it gives to his self-invented catechism. I do not believe that the art of man ever can invent--I know it never has invented--any set of rules or formulas by which you can decide, off-hand and with certainty, that a great story in verse, which you admit to have power and beauty and pathos and melody, does not belong to true poetry. One great school of critics discovered, by the application of such high rules and canons that Shakespeare, though a great genius was not a great poet; a later school made a similar discovery with regard to Schiller; a certain body of critics now say the same of Byron. I don't think it matters much what you call the work.

"The Spanish Gypsy" has imagination and beauty; it has exquisite pictures and lofty thoughts; it has melody and music. Admitting this much, and the most depreciating critics did admit it, I think it hardly worth considering what name we are to apply to the book. Such, however, was the sort of controversy in which all deep and true consideration of the artistic value of "The Spanish Gypsy" evaporated. I am not sorry Mrs. Lewes published the poem; but I am sorry she put her literary name to it in the first instance. Had it appeared anonymously it would have astonished and delighted the world. But people compared "The Spaniel Gypsy" with the author's prose works, and were disappointed because the woman who surpa.s.sed d.i.c.kens in fiction did not likewise surpa.s.s Tennyson and Browning in poetry. Thus, and in no other sense, was "The Spanish Gypsy" a failure. No woman had written anything of the same kind to surpa.s.s it; but some men, even of our own day, had--and no man of our day has written novels which excel those of George Eliot. Mrs. Lewes will probably not write any more long poems; but I think English poetry has gained something by her one venture.

Mrs. Lewes's mind is of a cla.s.s which, however varied its power, is not fairly described by the word "versatile." Versatility is a smaller kind of faculty, a dexterity of intellect and capacity--the property of a mind of the second order. If we want a perfect type and pattern of versatility, we may find it very close to the auth.o.r.ess of "Silas Marner," in the person of her husband, George Henry Lewes. What man of our day has done so many things and done them so well? He is the biographer of Goethe and of Robespierre; he has compiled the "History of Philosophy," in which he has something really his own to say of every great philosopher, from Thales to Sch.e.l.ling; he has translated Spinoza; he has published various scientific works; he has written at least two novels; he has made one of the most successful dramatic adaptations known to our stage; he is an accomplished theatrical critic; he was at one time so successful as an amateur actor that he seriously contemplated taking to the stage as a profession, in the full conviction, which he did not hesitate frankly to avow, that he was destined to be the successor to Macready. He did actually join a company at one of the Manchester theatres, and perform there for some time under a feigned name; but the amount of encouragement he received from the public did not stimulate him to continue on the boards, although I believe his confidence in his own capacity to succeed Macready remained unshaken. Mr. Lewes was always remarkable for a frank and fearless self-conceit, which, by its very sincerity and audacity, almost disarmed criticism. Indeed, I do not suppose any man less gifted with self-confidence would have even attempted to do half the things which George Henry Lewes has done well. Margaret Fuller was very unfavorably impressed by Lewes when she met him at Thomas Carlyle's house, and she wrote of him contemptuously and angrily. But these were the days of Lewes's Bohemianism; days of an audacity and a self-conceit unsubdued as yet by experience and the world, and some saddening and some refining influences; and Margaret Fuller failed to appreciate the amount of intellect and manliness that was in him. Charlotte Bronte, on the other hand, was quite enthusiastic about Lewes, and wrote to him and of him with an almost amusing veneration. Indeed, he is a man of ability and versatility that may fairly be called extraordinary. His merit is not that he has written books on a great variety of subjects. London has many hack writers who could go to work at any publisher's order and produce successively an epic poem, a novel, a treatise on the philosophy of the conditioned, a handbook of astronomy, a farce, a life of Julius Caesar, a history of African explorations, and a volume of sermons. But none of these productions would have one gleam of genuine native vitality about it. The moment it had served its purpose in the literary market it would go, dead, down to the dead. Lewes's works are of quite a different style. They have positive merit and value of their own, and they live. It was a characteristically audacious thing to attempt to cram the history of philosophy into a couple of medium-sized volumes, polis.h.i.+ng off each philosopher in a few pages--draining him, plucking out the heart of his mystery and his system, and stowing him away in the gla.s.s jar designed to exhibit him to an edified cla.s.s of students. But it must be avowed that Lewes's has been a marvellously clever and successful attempt. He certainly crumples up the whole science of metaphysics, sweeps away transcendental philosophy, and demolishes _a priori_ reasoning, in a manner which strongly reminds one of Arthur Pendennis upsetting, in a das.h.i.+ng criticism and on the faith of an hour's reading in an encyclopaedia, some great scientific theory of which he had never heard previously, and the development of which had been the life's labor of a sage. But Lewes does, somehow or other, very often come to a right conclusion, and measure great theories and men with accurate estimate; and the work is immensely interesting, and it is not easy to see how anybody could have done it better. His "Life of Goethe"

is undoubtedly a very successful, symmetrical, and comprehensive piece of biography. Some of his scientific studies have a genuine value, and they are all fascinating. One of his pieces--adapted from the French, of course, as most so-called English pieces are--will always be played while Charles Mathews lives, or while there are actors who can play in Charles Mathews's style. I wonder whether any of the readers of THE GALAXY read, or having read remember, Lewes's novels? I only recollect two of them, and I do not know whether he wrote any others. One was called "Ranthorpe," and it had, in its day, quite a sort of success. How long ago was it published? Fully twenty years, I should think: I remember quite well being thrown into youthful raptures with it at the time. But I do not go upon my boyish admiration for it. I came across it somewhere much more recently, and read it through. There was a good deal of inflation, and audacity, and nonsense in it; but at the same time it showed more of brains and artistic impulse and constructive power than nine out of every ten novels published in England to-day. It was all about a young poet, who came to London and made, for a moment, a great success, and was dazzled by it, and became intoxicated with love for a l.u.s.trous beauty of high rank, who only played with him; and how he forgot, for a time, the modest, delightful, simple girl to whom he was pledged at home; and how he did not get on, and the public and the _salons_ grew tired of him; and he became miserable, and was going to drown himself (I think), but was prevented by some wise and timely person; and how, of course, it all came right in the end, and he was redeemed. This outline, probably, will not suggest much of originality to any reader; but there was a great deal of freshness and thought in the book, some of the incidents and one or two of the characters had a flavor of originality about them; and the style was, for the most part, animated and attractive. It was the work of a man of brains, and culture, and taste; and one felt this all through, and was not ashamed of the time spent in reading it. The other of Lewes's novels was called "Rose, Blanche, and Violet." It charmed me a good deal when I read it; but I have not read it lately, and so I forbear giving any decided opinion as to its merits. It is, of course, quite settled now that George Lewes had not in him the materials to make a successful novelist; but men of far less talent have produced far worse novels than his, and been, in their way, successful.

Lewes first became prominent in literature as a contributor to the "Leader," a very remarkable weekly organ of advanced opinions on all questions, which was started in London seventeen or eighteen years ago, and died, after much flickering and lingering, in 1861 or thereabouts.

The "Leader," in its early and best days, fairly sparkled all over with talent, originality and audacity. It was to extreme philosophical radicalism, (with a dash of something like atheism) what the "Sat.u.r.day Review" now is to cultured swelldom and Belgravian Sadduceeism. Miss Martineau wrote for it. Lewes and Thornton Hunt (they were then intimates, unfortunately for Lewes) were among its princ.i.p.al contributors; Edward Whitty flung over its pages the brilliant eccentric light which was destined to immature and melancholy extinction. Lewes's theatrical criticisms, which he used to sign "Vivian," were inimitable in their vivacity, their wit, and their keenness, even when their soundness of judgment was most open to question. Poor Charles Kean was an especial object of Lewes's detestation, and was accordingly pelted and peppered with torturingly clever and piquant pasquinades in