His Mission.
He 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 Gentlemanly Interest. That is his mission in 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 Gentlemanly Interest. In his youth (as 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 anti-Berliozian 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 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 that nothing is enough. ‘Whether this 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 ‘masterpiece,’ and as ‘three volumes of 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.