Churchill had hitherto always managed wisely his great stakes and pretensions in both the fashionable and literary world. He had never actually published any thing except a clever article or two in a review, or an epigram, attributed to him but not acknowledged. Having avoided giving his measure, it was believed he was above all who had been publicly tried—it was always said—“If Horace Churchill would but publish, he would surpass every other author of our times.”
Churchill accordingly dreaded and hated all who might by possibility approach the throne of fashion, or interfere with his dictatorship in a certain literary set in London, and from this moment he began cordially to detest Beauclerc—he viewed him with a scornful, yet with jealous eyes; but his was the jealousy of vanity, not of love; it regarded Lady Davenant and his fashionable reputation in the first place—Helen only in the second.
Lady Davenant observed all this, and was anxious to know how much or how little Helen had seen, and what degree of interest it excited in her mind. One morning, when they were alone together, looking over a cabinet of cameos, Lady Davenant pointed to one which she thought like Mr. Beauclerc. Helen did not see the likeness.
“People see likenesses very differently,” said Lady Davenant. “But you and I, Helen, usually see characters, if not faces, with the same eyes. I have been thinking of these two gentlemen, Mr. Churchill and Mr. Beauclerc—which do you think the most agreeable?”
“Mr. Churchill is amusing certainly,” said Helen, “but I think Mr. Beauclerc’s conversation much more interesting—though Mr. Churchill is agreeable, sometimes—when—”
“When he flatters you,” said Lady Davenant.
“When he is not satirical—I was going to say,” said Helen.
“There is a continual petty brilliancy, a petty effort too,” continued Lady Davenant, “in Mr. Churchill, that tires me—sparks struck perpetually, but then you hear the striking of the flints, the clink of the tinder-box.”
Helen, though she admitted the tinder-box, thought it too low a comparison. She thought Churchill’s were not mere sparks.
“Well, fireworks, if you will,” said Lady Davenant, “that rise, blaze, burst, fall, and leave you in darkness, and with a disagreeable smell too; and it’s all feu d’artifice after all. Now in Beauclerc there is too little art and too ardent nature. Some French friends of mine who knew both, said of Mr. Churchill, ‘De l’esprit on ne peut pas plus même à Paris,’ the highest compliment a Parisian can pay, but they allowed that Beauclerc had ‘beaucoup plus d’ame.’”