In Coningsby he invented the Political Novel. That this partus masculus came so late to birth in our literature, as that it has begotten few successors, admits (as Sir Thomas Browne would say) no wide solution. Genius is rare, anyhow: the combination of political with literary genius necessarily rarer. Given the two combined, as they were in Burke, you still require, for superadding, the inventive faculty, the mode, and the leisure. Not one man of letters in ten thousand can match Disraeli’s close inner acquaintance with his subject. Statesmen, in short, have not the leisure to write. Alcibiades leaves no record of what Alcibiades did or suffered. By a glorious fluke, Peel gave this chance and Disraeli took it.
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.
MRS. GASKELL
I
We think of her habitually—do we not?—by her married title of “Mrs. Gaskell.” Who Mr. Gaskell was this generation does not, in an ordinary way, pause to enquire: a neglect which does injustice to a gentleman of fine presence, noble manners and high culture. She was a beautiful woman: they married in 1832, and had children, and lived most happily.
So it is as “Mrs. Gaskell” that we think of her: and I dare to wager that most of you think of her as Mrs. Gaskell, authoress of Cranford. Now heaven forbid that anything I say this morning should daunt your affection for Cranford, as heaven knows how long and sincerely I have adored it. I have adored it at least long enough and well enough to understand its devotees—for Cranford has not only become popular in the sense, more or less, that Omar Khayyam has become popular—by which I mean that, at this season or thereabouts, numbers of people buy a copy in limp suède, with Hugh Thomson’s illustrations, and only hesitate over sending it to the So-and-So’s with best wishes on a chilling doubt that they sent it last year, with the identical good wishes—if indeed they are not returning the identical volume they received! Well, let us be merry and careless!—in the course of a week or two these soft bricks will be dropping on every hearth.
But seriously, one finds devotees of Cranford everywhere; and especially, in my experience, among scholarly old men. They have Cranford written on their hearts, sometimes hardly covering a cherished solution of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Cranford and the novels of Jane Austen—you never know how many delightful persons cherish them, have them by heart, pore over their text as over an Ode of Pindar’s. And they are fierce, these devotees, as the noble new edition of Jane Austen by Mr. Chapman of the Oxford Press has recently been teaching us. Here are five volumes edited with all the care that study and affection can lavish on the task. Yet from here, there and everywhere lovers start up from firesides—scattered widowers of this dear maiden—challenging over variae lectiones, feeling for the hilt on the old hip to champion (we’ll say) “screen” as the right word against “scene” as printed—