6

tion,' said the Duchess, as they returned. Where can you have been?' 'I have been in Corisande's garden,' said Lothair, and she has given me a rose.'

So ends Lothair,' of which we have been thus careful in giving a faithful analysis, lest any one should say that we have not read the book. We have indicated our opinion pretty freely as we went along. That we have found it lively and amusing we are quite ready to admit. But when the Olympians descend into the arena and contend with common mortals, we expect to find them something more than lively and amusing. If they reveal themselves to vulgar eyes, it is at the peril of their Godheads that they come into the lists. If nobility 'obliges,' still more do statesmanship and former literary fame. Mr. Disraeli, the author of 'Vivian Grey,' and 'Henrietta Temple,' of 'Coningsby,' and 'Sybil,' and 'Tancred,' was bound if he wrote again to be something more than lively and amusing. He had already thrown his quoit beyond the mark of most men; in 'Lothair' it was necessary to equal or surpass his former cast or fail. Judged by what he has already done both in literature and statesmanship, 'Lothair' is a failure. It may be very instructive to our golden youth to be warned against the machinations. of Rome; but to effect this purpose, it was hardly worth the while of the leader of a great political party in the State to write a book which has been as sour grapes to the teeth of all the Roman Catholics in the land. A great statesman is bound, in our opinion, to consider all sides and respect all creeds. If he exposes the errors of any Church, he ought not to confound the innocent with the guilty. We believe that there are no purer high-minded gentlemen on earth than some of our Roman Catholic countrymen, and it is a great mistake in a statesman like Mr. Disraeli to deride them in a book which he calls a novel, but which is after all a political pamphlet, and a bid for the bigoted voices of Exeter Hall. Such an outrage will neither add to his followers in St. Stephens, nor to his reputation as a writer, because it sins alike against good taste and justice. But it was necessary, some one will say, that our youth should be warned; salus populi suprema lex, and this was why Mr. Disraeli put that line from Terence on the title page: Nosse omnia hæc salus est adolescentulis. Well! there are worse things in 'Lothair' even than the Church of Rome. What is to be said of a young nobleman, who, after proposing offhand to one young lady, flirts desperately with a second, and then falls madly in love with another man's wife. That adultery is a deadly sin is no doubt one of the things most salutary for young men to know; though as the Bible already existed, not to mention the Book of Common

G 2

Prayer,

Prayer, and the Whole Duty of Man,' we do not think it necessary to have written a book to prove it. But it is what often happens. Very true. So long as men are men, and women women, such social crimes will never fail among us. But why dwell on them or point them out? It was to show the perfection of Theodora and the weakness of Lothair. Theodora was indeed 'divine,' and Lothair we have seen described as 'a goose,' but then he was a golden one; we quite agree with Theodora's friends in their estimate of her character, and when we find any woman like her, we may perhaps show ourselves as great geese as Lothair. One great fault of the book to our minds is this; that as Theodora is the heroine, and Lothair's character is too weak and silly to supply her loss, the interest in the story ceases with the second volume when Theodora dies. The Lady Corisande still lives, indeed, but she is little better than a lay figure, very well dressed -an aristocratic doll which has been taught to speak and walk. The third volume is filled with the scenes at the Agostini Palace and in the Coliseum, which are as incomprehensible to us as the transcendental philosophy, or the Comtist vagaries. In the third volume, too, are chiefly to be found those revelations of the life and doings of the Phoebus family, which are among the most absurd and unnatural parts of the book. And now we have uttered the word 'unnatural,' that is the great sin of 'Lothair.' It is natural, neither in the story, though that is sufficiently interesting to be amusing and readable, nor in the society described, nor in the personages which figure in that society. Most unnatural is it in the style and in the language. That there are happy thoughts and epigrammatic sentences sown broadcast in its pages need scarcely be said of a novel written by Mr. Disraeli. But as the true pearl lies embedded in the loose fibre of a mollusc, so Mr. Disraeli's gems of speech and thought are hidden in a vast maze of verbiage which can seldom be called English, and very frequently is downright nonsense. The first editions were full of misprints, such as Stephanopolis,' for 'Stephanotis,' reminding us of poor Sir Archibald Alison's 'Sir Peregrine Pickle' for Sir Peregrine Maitland, though not quite equalling his translation of droit du timbre into 'timber duties.' Some of these have disappeared in after impressions, but all through the book whole sentences would have to be rewritten to make them either grammatical or intelligible.

As for the characters, many of them are said to be too closely drawn from real life. Here we think the gossips who utter this sentiment are unjust. No doubt suggestions of character were presented to Mr. Disraeli by those whom he met in daily intercourse, but it is the privilege of an author to develop these mere sugges

tions into the finished characters in his work. We do not believe that Mr. Disraeli has done more than this, even in that memorable case of the Oxford Professor, in which Mr. Goldwin Smith is so determined that the cap shall fit his own head. For that cap there are many candidates in Young Oxford. Who shall point out the man among us who entirely matches Mr. Pinto the Portuguese, whose observation of English was that it was limited to four or five words, 'nice, jolly, charming, love, and fond.' Why he did not add awful' and awfully' to his list we cannot imagine; but we cannot help wishing for our own sakes that Mr. Disraeli's command of the vernacular had been almost as limited. There are points of Pinto which can be traced in several inen; but the whole Pinto is a cento made out of several persons. In one point many agree with him. He was not an intellectual Croesus, but his pockets were full of sixpences.' Small talk and small change are to be found in this metropolis in many mouths and pockets. The same may be said of Hugo Bohun, who certainly says some of the smartest things in the book, of the surly and dissolute Duke of Brecon, of the outspoken St. Aldegonde, and the great Duke of Dash himself! They are all very near being the portraits of people we know; but just as we are saying, 'how like so and so,' a difference appears, and we add, 'yet after all it cannot be he.' But as a great author on his death-bed said to his children, 'above all things be natural '—so we repeat that the great fault of 'Lothair' is that it is not true to nature. There is an unreality about even the best characters in the book which mars their life, and makes them little better than abstractions and dreams. Very remarkable is the entire absence of passion in a novel in which there is so much love-making. This is a merit we are told, but a merit to our minds rather suited to the meridian of country reading-clubs and ladies' schools. It is one which makes 'Lothair' very safe reading for young ladies, but at the same time is fatal to it as a living and lasting work. So far as feeling is concerned, Lothair' is as dull as ditch-water and as flat as a flounder. But to return to our great complaint. We say the language is unnatural as well as the story and the characters. If 'one touch of Nature makes the whole world kin,' surely the utter absence of it in 'Lothair' must set the world against it as a work of art. It is certainly not natural in young men to make ' reverences of ceremony even to Duchesses. Still less is it natural to speak of a young lady having a tumult on her brow,' or of ladies out riding as 'jumping on their barbs and jenets,' or as riding, even in an island of the Ægean, 'on cream-coloured Anatolian chargers with golden bells.' When a lord like Lothair goes to the opera, if he is goose enough to give the box-keeper a

guinea,

guinea, it is not natural to describe him as giving that official 'an overpowering honorarium.''A modish scene' is certainly not native English, any more than 'brusk.' How a woman or a woman's portrait can make a fury,' unless she were married to a certain dark gentleman who shall be nameless, we cannot tell. One of our minor poets named Milton, who was at least as famous as Mr. Disraeli for his wealth of words, has indeed sung thus:

Where perhaps some beauty lies,

The cynosure of neighbouring eyes.'

That was a bold, as it is still a beautiful metaphor, yet we can fancy some carping critic of the Caroline age ridiculing the young poet as likening his mistress to a puppy-dog's tail. What would he now say if he heard that, in what is meant for sober prose, a lovely lady of the nineteenth century was called the Cynosure of the Empyrean,' the puppy-dog's tail of the 'burning fiery vault of heaven.' What could he say but that Mr. Disraeli had out-Miltoned Milton, and made himself and his heroine supremely ridiculous. But it is just this fatal wealth, whether of words or worldly goods, which is the ruin of Lothair.' The language is an affected unnatural euphuism, a jargon of no particular time or class, abounding in unmeaning adjectives and senseless substantives, piled in profusion one upon the other, setting at defiance both the rules of grammar and common-sense. Penny-a-lining run mad is perhaps the best description that we can give of it. It is just what the late lamented Mr. Jenkins would have written in Bedlam. God help the little Hottentot, or whatever may be the race of the future, who is set a page of Lothair' to translate into his own tongue two hundred years hence. As in the days of the patriarchs all men are said to have been giants, so in 'Lothair' all the chief characters are dukes or marquises, or the offspring of emperors and princes. As regards their incomes they are millionaires. But what we did not know till we read this book was, that the accumulation of riches renders men liberal. Look at old Cantacuzene, a man in business- we beg his pardon, 'in affairs;' had he only carried on his affairs in the princely way in which he treated the parvenu Duke of Dash, he would have been in the 'Gazette' in twelve months. He at any rate is not true to nature. In real life he would have screwed down his son-in-law, looked sharp after settlements, and after all have gone about saying that the ducal house of Dash were little better than beggars. No! all experience teaches us that amassing money does not make men either open-handed or open-hearted. The most liberal men per

haps

haps are they who spend other people's money, for it has cost them nothing to come by it. Then come men of moderate income, to which they have succeeded. But your mere millionaire! he should be painted without purse or pocket. Great wealth acquired by toil of brain or hand is close clutched and hugged as though it were hardly one's own, and might take wings and fly away again.

Why a great writer like Mr. Disraeli should be thus affected and unnatural, why his English should be stilted and false, and his treasures of wealth as tawdry as tinsel, is not easy to understand. Perhaps like Tiberius he has outlived life, seen through it and found it all a sham. The dukes and marquises whom he has so long led despise and distrust him. Very well! he will be revenged on them. He will write them down, and behold he has done it in 'Lothair.' If these be thy dukes, O England, if this is all the wit and wisdom that your aristocratic circles can show, of what worth are titles and dukedoms? It is impossible to mistake the vein of satire against the upper classes which runs through the book like a thread of gold. The tendency of 'Lothair' with all its dukes and duchesses is intensely democratic. When he makes it rather a mesalliance for the daughter of a merchant like Cantacuzene, to marry the eldest son of the Duke of Dash, we cannot help feeling that Mr. Disraeli is all the while laughing in his sleeve at the aristocracy. But worse remains behind. The author of 'Lothair' is plainly laughing at the public, at you reader, and at us. He is sick of our favour and applause; he has come to see the vanity of novel readers, and so he has written a book full of the most extravagant absurdities for you to swallow and admire. At us, too, the critics, the men,' according to Mr. Phœbus, who have failed in literature and art,' he has been mocking and jeering all the while, and when he laid down his pen after plucking that 'rose out of the garden of Corisande,' he probably said to himself, 'If the British public can call this a good book they are fools enough to believe anything.'

ART. IV.-1. Judicial Statistics. 1868.

2. Criminal Returns: Metropolitan Police. 1868.

3. General Regulations, Instructions, and Orders, for the Government and Guidance of the Metropolitan Police Force. 1862. 4. Report of the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis. 1870.

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ONDON has long since ceased to mean that part of the capital which is governed by its medieval corporation. Though The City' is still the great centre of commerce, and

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