VIII
For a last word to-day—
Quite apart from genuine coruscation of genius, and almost as widely separating and casting from account that tinsel and tawdriness which all can detect, one feels a mistrust (gnawing, as it were, within our laurel) that even the best page of Disraeli does not belong to us. We cannot match it somehow with a racy page of Dryden, or of good Sir Walter Scott, of Izaak Walton, John Bunyan, grave Clarendon, Bolingbroke. Gibbon is artificial enough, heaven knows; yet somehow—and one remembers that he had served in the Hampshire Militia—the scent of the hawthorn is never more afar than a field away, even when he discourses of Tertullian or of Diocletian. From Disraeli’s prose—or rather from my sense of it—I can never dispel the smatch of burnt sandalwood, the smell of camels and the bazaar. He officiates, somehow—he, a Prime Minister, over an altar not ours—we admire the oracle, but its tongue is foreign.
Still his fame grows. I observe that, as the incense clears, each successive study of him tells something better. He stands in politics admittedly a champion; in literature, too, a figure certainly not among the greatest, yet as certainly one of the great.