ART. VII.-LOTHAIR.

Lothair. By the Right Honourable B. DISRAELI.

Green, & Co.

London: Longmans,

F George Eliot or Anthony Trollope had chosen to make

high

and but lately come of age, the theme of a three-volume novel; and if, instead of the Marquis of Bute, who has merely become a Roman Catholic, the Marquis of Hastings or the Duke of Newcastle, who exercised their free will by embracing a different line of life not less conspicuous, were selected as its hero; if their relatives and friends, some of whom the novelist had happened to come in contact with through opportunities of office, or at houses where he had been received as a friend, were portrayed under transparent disguises in caricatures of unaffected malignity, it is not difficult to imagine what would be the verdict of men of letters and men of honour on such a book and on its author. It might be asked, in the first place, whether inventive power is not the principal talent of a writer of fiction; and whether the primary condition of its exercise is not the conception of perfectly original types of character, of ideal personages, never met with in the flesh, yet whom the author's imagination invests with a vivid, individual reality; and its second condition, the construction of circumstances and situations of a curious and unprecedented novelty, which, nevertheless, are in perfect harmony with the unities of art and the nature of things. If, then, it came to be known that some eminent novelist had fallen into the habit of finding his characters at the dinner tables, and his incidents in the family history of his acquaintance; that his books were only transparent travesties of events of the day, filled with venomous sketches of personages to whose intimacy he had, on different pretences, penetrated; that his plot attributed to them motives as coarse as those of Greek bandits and tricks as base as those of Epsom jockeys, what would the world not say of such an unique development of moral and intellectual depravity? But if this example came to be applauded and received as the rule of a new school of writers, then critics, skilled in the history of letters, such a critic as Disraeli the Elder, for example,— would know that the time had come in which it only remained to study the successive stages of the decay of a once Fine Art. The standard of an eminent branch of modern literature would at once be lowered, and men would gradually come to

regard the profession of a novelist as one to be cut and blackballed. But what every writer of fiction, who aspires to a fair fame, would regard as a violation of the canons of his art, as well as of the ethics and etiquette of social life, it seems that a gentleman who lately occupied the situation of chief adviser of the Crown may do, not merely with impunity, but with almost general approval from the critics and the crowd. It is not, however, we may be permitted to suspect, every topic of high life, as open to free treatment as the conversion of Lord Bute, that even Mr. Disraeli, in all the exuberant insolence of this aftermath of his fancy, would have ventured to treat in a novel. We live in a time, unhappily, fertile in bizarre effects and sensational situations. But if (to take the last sad vicissitudes of aristocratic life in England on which the white light of the law and the beacon flame of the press have flared)—if Mr. Disraeli had made the history of Lothair blend the follies of Lord Courtenay with some of the more suspicious incidents of the Mordaunt case, and if he had wantonly and unwarrantably brought a Prince of the Blood instead of a Prince of the Church on the stage, would not all England have rung with a cry of shame? It is still safe, however, it seems, to violate every rule of art and every sanction of society, where the Catholic Church is in any way concerned. The end justifies the means when Titus Oates, in three volumes, exposes the last Popish Plot.

"But why," may some of the chorus of indolent reviewers exclaim-" why identify Lord Bute with Lothair, or name the name of the Cardinal? Why not ignore what every one knows? In a system like yours, one expects to find hypocrisy more elaborately and artistically organized." Mr. Goldwin Smith has been very hardly handled by the editor of the Times, for saying that the Oxford Professor's cap fitted his head to a nicety; and it was ironically hoped, on that occasion, that Mr. Phoebus or Mr. Pinto would be the next to avow himself. Now this is a point, we submit with all the respect that is due to so great an authority, upon which some consideration is due to the author's avowed wishes. What the critics, possibly already beginning to repent of their blunder of a sudden, wish to ignore, and what we presume to regard simply as a scandal against the laws of letters and society, is formally pleaded by Mr. Disraeli as his especial merit. In the official synopsis of the story issued by Messrs. Longmans, it is premised that no small part of its

* Notes on Books, being an analysis of the works published during each quarter by Messrs. Longmans & Co., vol. iv. No. Ixi.

interest is due "to the introduction of familiar forms, veiled beneath disguises thinner than the drapery of a Grecian statue." This sentence has, it seems to us, the even swing of Mr. Disraeli's own style. It might be read as a part of that paragraph in which the "divine Theodora " is described with her Olympian countenance, her Phidian face, and her Greek fillets. The very figure occurs in a passage where Theodora exhibits to Lothair a new American statue in the grounds at Belmont :-" Though veiled with drapery which might have become the Goddess of Modesty, admirable art permitted the contour of the perfect form to be traced." But there is at all events one place where even the drapery is dispensed with, and where the author, as it were inadvertently, drops the key of the book. Every reader of "Lothair"

remembers the touch of art not meant to conceal but to reveal his artfulness, by which Mr. Disraeli once misprints Capel for Catesby*; and of course every one knows that Monsignor Capel received into the Church the year before last, a young nobleman, "whose vast inheritance is in many counties, and more than one kingdom." After all, there are not so many of them. Need his name be named?

Of course, as old novel readers remember, it is not the first offence of its kind which Mr. Disraeli has committed. There was a time when some one, obviously a critic, wished that his enemy would write a book; but Mr. Disraeli's impulse, on the contrary, has always been, as soon as he had made or flattered himself that he had made an enemy, to write a book, and to regard his book as a pillory on which to plant his enemy. From his earliest youth the many great qualities which he possesses have been marred by occasional outbursts of preposterous vanity and unruly vindictiveness. The morbid spleen and the vaulting egotism of his earlier writings were excused as the petulant protests of a young man of genius against a period in which he felt that he had not succeeded so rapidly as he deserved; who felt, perhaps, that he might never succeed to the point of his ambition, because of the bitter and obstinate prejudice of the country in which he was born against the race to which he belonged. He said in those days, "Every man has a right to be vain until he has succeeded." This sentence, whose moral would hardly commend itself to Epictetus, not to say Solomon, might be concluded in the same strain now-a-days, "No man who has succeeded has a right to be either vain or vindictive." Mr. Disraeli has succeeded

* Vol. iii. p. 254.

with a great success. He has held, for a time, that office whose power is greater than the power of any sovereign on the globe, save one. He, too, has made an archbishop, who is, in a sort of a way, the Head of a Church. He has made a duke; an Irish duke, certainly, in a peerage which now only exists upon paper, but who is, nevertheless, a duke, so far as the title goes, quite as much as any Sicilian or Dutch duke. He has given the Garter, and sighed, it was whispered, and glanced at his own knee as he did so. The title of Beaconsfield buckles the illustrious and venerable name of Edmund Burke to his name; a name lustrous certainly, but which, especially considering his last performance, hardly attracts homage. He has, if we may affect the grandiloquent strain of his younger days, controlled the conscience of the Monarch, and enlarged the liberties of the Multitude. But he has not yet learned that magnanimity is the true temper of a statesman. Whoso stands upon that lofty height, whence are swayed the civil destinies of one-sixth of the whole mass of mankind, of every race and creed and clime, should, if he have it not from nature, acquire, or at least affect, the majestic equanimity which is not less proper to a British Premier than to a Greek demigod. Some men, Mr. Disraeli's inferiors in those gifts which are ordinarily ascribed to genius, have sat in the great chair of the Imperial Council. It would be unfair to class him with Mr. Addington, who, after he had attained supreme office, treated Mr. Pitt somewhat as Lord Derby was treated last session, or to compare his talent to that of Lord Goderich, whose ministry was of as transitory a tenure. But who can imagine Sir Robert Peel, after he had fallen from office through the agency of what he regarded as an unnatural combination, actuated by the basest and most vindictive motives, indefatigably employing the period of his retreat to concoct a romance, in which an Irish demagogue, named MacDaniel, should be represented as suborning a Jewish gentleman of the press, named Ben Judah, with part of the Repeal Rent to subvert the Protestant Constitution, equally obnoxious to both the helot-born? The claims and the balance-weight of the Irish Catholics have wrecked more ministries since the Union than all other political questions and parties added together; and the line that was taken by some of their leaders and some of their bishops on the question of the Veto was very perplexing and even exasperating to several of the statesmen of the period of the Regency. But who can conceive Mr. Canning yielding to the temptation of writing a comedy in which Dr. Doyle should figure, in as thin a disguise as Mr. Disraeli has cast round the character of the

eminent personage whom he has chosen to name Doctor Churchill? Mr. Pitt, too, had his difficulties on this subject, in the royal closet, with his party, with those to whom he made promises which he not merely could not fulfil, but which he was obliged to break. His position was in many ways awkward, but his austere and impassable dignity sustained him through its severest stress. He did his duty, and died, and left his honour to history.

This book is, we maintain, an offence, even a gross offence, against the certainly undefined, but nevertheless well-understood rules, which bind the conduct of gentlemen, of statesmen, and of men of letters. But it is also, we perceive, regarded in certain quarters as a most subtle and formidable attack on the spirit and system of the Roman Catholic Church. In this regard it is about as worthy of serious notice as General O'Neill's recent equally profound and masterly attack upon the British Empire. The Church of Rome and the British Empire are, in truth, the better of such attacks now and then. They test strength; they clear the air; they, perhaps, prove men's mettle. And Roman Catholics, at all events, are simply not capable of feeling even the same degree of vexation at this sudden somewhat treacherous volley fired into their flank by a statesman who but lately wished to be regarded as their natural ally, that ordinary Englishmen feel at the more recent and not less grotesque and ignoble Fenian raid on the Canadian frontier. The judicious will take note that Mr. Disraeli is not a safe person with whom to transact public affairs, when Catholic Interests require, as unfortunately they too often do, to be brought before statesmen in office or in opposition. Some Catholics, however, far from regarding "Lothair" as a signal of rupture, and as a sort of curiouslyprolonged and melodiously-modulated No Popery Cry, are so very charitable as to suppose that Mr. Disraeli meant by his picturesque delineation of some of the characters in this story to give, as through a glass darkly, and in outlines blurred here and there, an image not all unfaithful notwithstanding, of the power and beauty which attend the action of the Church. We have the honour to be Mr. Disraeli's very obedient humble servants; and without at all accepting Mr. O'Connell's savage, however grossly-provoked version of his genealogy, we may, perhaps, in regard to this far too highly-exalted view of the subject, presume to say that the Church of Christ does not stand in need of the right honourable gentleman's furtively (we had almost said, jesuitically) insinuated patronage.

Some future collector of Curiosities of Literature will doubtless trace with critical skill the causes and the ways whereby