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 even—till his posthumous disciples made him so—a person of any particular importance. One writing a private memorandum of his death might have produced something like this: Samuel Butler was an unsociable, burry, crotchety, obstinate old bachelor, a dilettante in art and science, an unsuccessful author, a witty cynic of inquisitive temper and, comprehensively speaking, the unregarded Diogenes of the Victorians. Son of a clergyman and grandson of a bishop, born in 1835, educated at Cambridge, he began to prepare for ordination. But, as we are told, because of scruples regarding infant baptism he abandoned the prospect of holy orders and in 1859 sailed for New Zealand, where with capital supplied by his father he engaged in sheep-farming for five years. In 1864, returning to England with £8,000, he established himself for life at Clifford's Inn, London. He devoted some years to painting, adored Handel and dabbled in music, made occasional trips to Sicily and Italy, and wrote a dozen books, which generally fell dead from the press, on religion, literature, art and scientific theory. "Erewhon," however, a Utopian romance published in 1872, had by 1899 sold between three and four thousand copies. Butler made few friends and apparently never married. He died in 1902. His last words were: "Have you brought the cheque book, Alfred?" His body was cremated and the ashes were buried in a garden by his biographer and his man-servant, with nothing to mark the spot.

Butler's indifference to the disposal of his earthly

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 part betokens no contempt for fame. Denied contemporary renown, he had firmly set his heart on immortality, and quietly, persistently, cannily provided for it. If he could not go down to posterity by the suffrage of his countrymen, he would go down by the shrewd use of his cheque book: he would buy his way in. He bought the publication of most of the books produced in his lifetime' He diligently prepared manuscripts for posthumous publication and accumulated and arranged great masses of materials for a biographer. He insured an interest in his literary remains by bequeathing them and all copyrights to his literary executor, R. A. Streatfeild. He purchased an interest in a biographer by persuading Henry Festing Jones, a feckless lawyer of Butlerian proclivities, to abandon the law and become his musical and literary companion. In return for these services, Mr. Jones received between 1887 and 1900 an allowance of £200 a year, and at Butler's death a bequest of £500, the musical copyrights and the manifest responsibility and privilege of assisting Streatfeild with the propagation of Butler's fame, together with their own, in the next generation.

These good and faithful servants performed their duties with exemplary zeal and astuteness. In 1903, the year following the Master's death, Streatfeild published "The Way of All Flesh," a book packed with satirical wit, the first since "Erewhon" which was capable of walking off on its own legs and exciting general curiosity about its author—curiosity in

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 tensified by the announcement that the novel had been written between 1872 and 1884. In the wake of this sensation there began the systematic annual relaunching of old works, with fresh introductions and memoirs and a piecemeal feeding out of other literary remains, culminating in 1917 with the publication of "The Note-Books," a skillful collection and condensation of the whole of Butler's intellectual life. Meanwhile, in 1908, the Erewhon dinner had been instituted. In spite of mild deprecation, this feast, with its two toasts to his Majesty and to the memory of Samuel Butler, assumed from the outset the aspect of a solemn sacrament of believers. Among these was conspicuous on the second occasion Mr. George Bernard Shaw, not quite certain, perhaps, whether he had come to give or to receive honor, whether he was himself to be regarded as the beloved disciple or rather as the one for whom Butler, preaching in the Victorian wilderness, had prepared the way with "free and future-piercing suggestions."

By 1914, Streatfeild was able to declare that no fragment of Butler's was too insignificant to publish. In 1915 and 1916 appeared extensive critical studies by Gilbert Cannan and John F. Harris. In 1919 at last arrives Henry Festing Jones with the authoritative memoir in two enormous volumes with portraits, documents, sumptuous index, elaborate bibliography and a pious accounting to the public for the original manuscripts, which have been deposited like sacred relics at St. John's College, the

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 Bodleian, the British Museum, the Library of Congress and at various shrines in Italy and Sicily. Here are materials for a fresh consideration of the man in relation to his work.

The unconverted will say that such a monument to such a man is absurdly disproportionate. But Butler is now more than a man. He is a spiritual ancestor, leader of a movement, molder of young minds, founder of a faith. His monument is designed not merely to preserve his memory but to mark as well the present importance of the Butlerian sect. The memoir appears to have been written primarily for them. The faithful will no doubt find it delicious; and I, though an outsider, got through it without fatigue, with a kind of perverse pleasure in its perversity.

It is very instructive, but it by no means simplifies its puzzling and complex subject. Mr. Jones is not of the biographers who look into the heart of a man, reduce him to a formula and recreate him in accordance with it. He works from the outside inward, and gradually achieves life and reality by an immense accumulation of objective detail, without ever plucking out, or even plucking at, the heart of the mystery. What were the man's "master passion" and his master faculty? Butler himself did not know; consequently he could not always distinguish his wisdom from his folly. He was an ironist entangled in his own net and an egotist bitten with self-distrust, concealing his wounds in self-assertion and his hesitancies in an external aggres-

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 the pelagiaPelagia [sic] colorata that live in the Pacific Ocean: During the 1990s, defendant Christopher Lowry, a glass artist from Hawaii, also began making glass-in-glass jellyfish sculptures. Lowry’s sculptures look like Satava’s, and many people confuse them:

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 siveness. Mr. Jones pierces the shell here and there, but never removes it. Considering his opportunities, he is sparing in composed studies of his subject based on his own direct observation; and, with all his ingenuousness and his shocking but illuminating indiscretions, he is frequently silent as a tomb where he must certainly possess information for which every reader will inquire, particularly those readers who do not, like the Butlerians, accept Samuel Butler as the happy reincarnation of moderation, common sense and fearless honesty.

The whole case of the Georgians against the Victorians might be fought out over his life and works; and indeed there has already been many a skirmish in that quarter. For, of course, neither Streatfeild nor Mr. Jones is ultimately responsible for his revival. Ultimately Butler's vogue is due to the fact that he is a friend of the Georgian revolution against idealism in the very citadel of the enemy; the extraordinary acclaim with which he is now received is his reward for having long ago prepared to betray the Victorians into the hands of a ruthless posterity. He was a traitor to his own times, and therefore it follows that he was a man profoundly disillusioned. The question which we may all reasonably raise with regard to a traitor whom we have received within our lines is whether he will make us a good citizen. We should like to know pretty thoroughly how he fell out with his countrymen—whether through defects in his own temper and character or through a clear-eyed and

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 righteous indignation with the incorrigible viciousness of their manners and institutions. We should like to know what vision of reformation succeeded his disillusion. Hitherto the Georgians have been more eloquent in their disillusions than in their vision, and have inclined to welcome Butler as a dissolving agent without much inspecting his solution.

The Butlerians admire Butler for his withering attack on family life, notably in "The Way of All Flesh"; and many a studious literary man with a talkative wife and eight romping children would, of course, admit an occasional flash of romantic envy for Butler's bachelor apartments. Mr. Jones tells us that Theobald and Christina Pontifex, whose nakedness Butler uncovers, were drawn without exaggeration from his own father and mother. His work on them is a masterpiece of pitiless satire. Butler appears to have hated his father, despised his mother and loathed his sisters in all truth and sincerity. He nursed his vindictive and contemptuous feelings towards them all through his life; he studied these feelings, made notes on them, jested out of them, lived in them, reduced them to a philosophy of domestic antipathy.

He was far more learned than any other English author in the psychology of impiety. When he heard some one say, "Two are better than one," he exclaimed, "Yes, but the man who said that did not know my sisters." When he was forty-eight years old he wrote to a friend that his father was in poor health and not likely to recover; "but may

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 hang on for months or go off with the N. E. winds which we are sure to have later on." In the same letter he writes that he is going to strike out forty weak pages in "Erewhon" and stick in forty stronger ones on the "trial of a middle-aged man 'for not having lost his father at a suitable age. His father's one unpardonable offence was not dying early and so enlarging his son's income. If this had been a jest, it would have been a little coarse for a deathbed. But Mr. Jones, who appears to think it very amusing, proves clearly enough that it was not a jest, but an obsession, and a horrid obsession it was. Now a man who attacks the family because his father does not die as promptly as could be desired is not likely to propose a happy substitute for the family: his mood is not reconstructive, funny though it may be in two old boys of fifty, like Butler and Jones, living along like spoiled children on allowances, Butler from his father, Jones from his mother.

The Butlerians admire Butler for his brilliant attack on "romantic" relations between the sexes. Before the advent of Shaw he poured poison on the roots of that imaginative love in which all normal men and maidens walk at least once in a lifetime as in a rosy cloud shot through with golden lights.

His portraits show a man of vigorous physique, capable of passion, a face distinctly virile, rather harshly bearded, with broad masculine eyebrows. Was he ever in love? If not, why was he not?

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 Elementary questions which his biographer after a thousand pages leaves unanswered. Mr. Jones asserts that both Overton and Ernest in "The Way of All Flesh" are in the main accurately autobiographical, and he furnishes much evidence for the point. He remarks a divergence in this fact, that Butler, unlike his hero, was never in prison. Did Butler, like his hero, have children and farm them out? The point is of some interest in the case of a man who is helping us to destroy the conventional family.

Mr. Jones leaves quite in the dark his relations with such women as the late Queen Victoria would not have approved, relations which J. B. Yeats has, however, publicly discussed. Mr. Jones is ordinarily cynical enough, candid enough, as we shall see. He takes pains to tell us that his own grandfather was never married. He does not hesitate to acknowledge abundance of moral ugliness in his subject. Why this access of Victorian reticence at a point where plain-speaking is the order of the day and the special pride of contemporary Erewhonians? Why did a young man of Butler's tastes leave the church and go into exile in New Zealand for five years? Could a more resolute biographer perhaps find a more "realistic" explanation than difficulties over infant baptism? Mr. Shaw told his publisher that Butler was "a shy old bird." In some respects he was also a sly old bird.

Among the "future-piercing suggestions" extolled by Mr. Shaw we may be sure that the author of

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 "Man and Superman" was pleased to acknowledge Butler's prediscovery that woman is the pursuer. This idea we may now trace quite definitely to his relations with Miss Savage, a witty, sensible, presumably virtuous woman of about his own age, living in a club in London, who urged him to write fiction, read all his manuscripts, knitted his socks, reviewed his books in women's magazines and corresponded with him for years till she died, without his knowledge, in hospital from cancer. Her letters are Mr. Jones's mainstay in his first volume and she is, except Butler himself, altogether his most interesting personality. Mr. Jones says that being unable to find any one who could authorize him to use her letters, he publishes them on his own responsibility. But he adds, "I cannot imagine that any relation of hers who may read her letters will experience any feelings other than pride and delight." This lady, he tells us, was the original of. Alethea Pontifex. But he marks a difference. Alethea was handsome. Miss Savage, he says, was short, fat, had hip disease, and "that kind of dowdiness which I used to associate with ladies who had been at school with my mother." Butler became persuaded that Miss Savage loved him; this bored him; and the correspondence would lapse till he felt the need of her cheery friendship again. On one occasion she wrote to him, "I wish that you did not know wrong from right." Mr. Jones believes that she was alluding to his scrupulousness in matters of business. Butler himself construed the words as an overture

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 to which he was indisposed to respond. The debate on this point and the pretty uncertainty in which it is left can surely arouse in Miss Savage's relations no other feelings than "pride and delight."

This brings us to the Butlerian substitute for the chivalry which used to be practised by those who bore what the Victorians called "the grand old name of gentleman." In his later years, after the death of Miss Savage, in periods of loneliness, depression and ill-health, Butler made notes on his correspondence, reproaching himself for his ill-treatment of her. "He also," says his biographer, "tried to express his remorse" in two sonnets, from which I extract some lines:

In these Butlerian times one who should speak of "good taste" would incur the risk of being called a prig. Good taste is no longer "in." Yet even now, in the face of these sonnets, may not one exclaim, Heaven preserve us from the remorseful moments of a Butlerian Adonis of fifty!

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 The descendants of eminent Victorians may well be thankful that their fathers had no intimate relations with Butler. There is a familiar story of Whistler, that when some one praised his latest portrait as equal to Velasquez, he snapped back, "Yes, but why lug in Velasquez?" Butler, with similar aversion for rivals, but without Whistler's extempore wit, slowly excogitated his killing sallies and entered them in his notebooks or sent them in a letter to Miss Savage, preserving a copy for the delectation of the next age: "I do not see how I can well call Mr. Darwin the Pecksniff of Science, though this is exactly what he is; but I think I may call Lord Bacon the Pecksniff of his age and then, a little later, say that Mr. Darwin is the Bacon of the Victorian Era." To this he adds another note reminding himself to call "Tennyson the Darwin of Poetry, and Darwin the Tennyson of Science." I can recall but one work of a contemporary mentioned favorably in the biography; perhaps there are two. The staple of his comment runs about as follows: "Middlemarch" is a "long-winded piece of studied brag"; of "John Inglesant," "I seldom was more displeased with any book"; of "Aurora Leigh," "I dislike it very much, but I liked it better than Mrs. Browning, or Mr., either"; of Rossetti, "I dislike his face and his manner and his work, and I hate his poetry and his friends"; of George Meredith, "No wonder if his work repels me that mine should repel him"; "all I remember is that I dislike and distrusted Morley"; of Glad-

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 stone, "Who was it said that he was 'a good man in the very worst sense of the words'?" The homicidal spirit here exhibited may be fairly related to his anxiety for the death of his father.

It was on the whole characteristic of Victorian free-thinkers to attack Christianity with reverence and discrimination in an attempt to preserve its substance while removing obstacles to the accepting of its substance. Butler was Voltairean. When he did not attack mischievously like a gamin, he attacked vindictively like an Italian laborer whose sweetheart has been false to him. I have seen it stated that he was a broad churchman and a communicant; and Mr. Jones produces a letter from a clergyman testifying to his "saintliness." But this must be some of Mr. Jones's fun. From Gibbon, read on the voyage to New Zealand, Butler imbibed, he says, in a letter of 1861, "a calm and philosophic spirit of impartial and critical investigation." In 1862 he writes: "For the present I renounce Christianity altogether. You say people must have something to believe in. I can only say that I have not found my digestion impeded since I left off believing in what does not appear to be supported by sufficient evidence." When in 1865 he printed his "Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ," the manner of his attack was impish; and so was the gleeful exchange of notes between him and Miss Savage over the way the orthodox swallowed the bait. In his notebook he wrote: "Mead is the lowest of the intoxicants, just as Church is the low-

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 est of the dissipations, and carraway seed the lowest of the condiments." He went to church once in 1883 to please a friend and was asked whether it had not bored him as inconsistent with his principles. "I said that, having given up Christianity, I was not going to be hampered by its principles. It was the substance of Christianity and not its accessories of external worship, that I had objected to. . . so I went to church out of pure cussedness." Finally, in a note of 1889: "There will be no comfortable and safe development of our social arrangements—I mean we shall not get infanticide and the permission of suicide, nor cheap and easy divorce—till Jesus Christ's ghost has been laid; and the best way to lay it is to be a moderate churchman."

Robert Burns was a free-thinker, but he wrote the "Cotter's Saturday Night"; Renan was a free-thinker, but he buried his God in purple; Matthew Arnold was a free-thinker, but he gave new life to the religious poetry of the Bible; Henry Adams believed only in mathematical physics, but he wrote of Mont St. Michel and Chartres with chivalrous and almost Catholic tenderness for the Virgin: for in all these diverse men there was reverence for what men have adored as their highest. There was respect for a tomb, even for the tomb of a God. Butler, having transferred his faith to the Bank of England, diverted himself like a street Arab with a slingshot by peppering the church windows. He established manners for the contemporary But-

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 lerian who, coming down to breakfast on Christmas morning, exclaims with a pleased smile, "Well, this is the birthday of the hook-nosed Nazarene!"

Butler's moral note is rather attractive to young and middle-aged persons: "We have all sinned and come short of the glory of making ourselves as comfortable as we easily might have done." His ethics is founded realistically on physiology and economics; for "goodness is naught unless it tends towards old age and sufficiency of means." Pleasure, dressed like a quiet man of the world, is the best teacher: "The devil, when he dresses himself in angels' clothes, can only be detected by experts of exceptional skill, and so often does he adopt this disguise that it is hardly safe to be seen talking to an angel at all, and prudent people will follow after pleasure as a more homely but more respectable and on the whole more trustworthy guide." There we have something of the tone of our genial Franklin; but Butler is a Franklin without a single impulse of Franklin's wide benevolence and practical beneficence, a Franklin shorn of the spirit of his greatness, namely, his immensely intelligent social consciousness.

Having disposed of Christianity, orthodox and otherwise, and having reduced the morality of "enlightened selfishness" to its lowest terms, Butler turned in the same spirit to the destructon of orthodox Victorian science. We are less concerned for the moment with his substance than with his character and manner as scientific controversialist. "If

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 I cannot," he wrote, "and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them." Though such professional training as he had was for the church and for painting, he seems never to have doubted that his mother wit was sufficient equipment, supplemented by reading in the British Museum, for the overthrow of men like Darwin, Wallace and Huxley, who from boyhood had given their lives to collecting, studying and experimenting with scientific data. "I am quite ready to admit," he records, "that I am in a conspiracy of one against men of science in general." Having felt himself covertly slighted in a book for which Darwin was responsible, he vindictively assailed, not merely the work, but also the character of Darwin and his friends, who naturally, inferring that he was an unscrupulous "bounder" seeking notoriety, generally ignored him.

His first "contribution" to evolutionary theory had been a humorous skit, written in New Zealand, on the evolution of machines, suggested by "The Origin of Species," and later included in "Erewhon." To support this whimsy he found it useful to revive the abandoned "argument from design"; and mother wit, still working whimsically, leaped to the conception that the organs of our bodies are machines. Thereupon he commenced serious scientific speculation, and produced "Life and Habit," 1878; "Evolution Old and New," 1879; "Unconscious Memory," 1880; and "Luck or Cunning," 1886. The

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 germ of all his speculations, contained in his first volume, is the notion of "the oneness of personality existing between parents and offspring up to the time that the offspring leaves the parent's body"; thence develops his theory that the offspring "unconsciously" remembers what happened to the parents; and thence his theory that a vitalistic purposeful cunning, as opposed to the Darwinian chance, is the significant factor in evolution. His theory has something in common with current philosophical speculation, and it is in part, as I understand, a kind of adumbration, a shrewd guess at the present attitude of cytologists. It has thus entitled Butler to half a dozen footnotes in a centenary volume on Darwin; but it hardly justifies his transference of Darwin's laurels to Buffon, Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin and himself; nor does it justify his reiterated contention that Darwin was a plagiarist, a fraud, a Pecksniff and a liar. He swelled the ephemeral body of scientific speculation; but his contribution to the verified body of science was negligible, and the injuries that he inflicted upon the scientific spirit were considerable.

For their symptomatic value, we must glance at Butler's sallies into some other fields. He held as an educational principle that it is hardly worth while to study any subject till one is ready to use it. When in his fifties he wished to write music, he took up for the first time the study of counterpoint. Mr. Garnett having inquired what subject Butler and Jones would take up when they had

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 In Hawaii, Satava’s sculptures have appeared in tourist brochures and art magazaines. The sculptures are sold in sixteen galleries and gift shops, and they appear in many store windows. Lowry admits he saw a picture of Satava’s jellyfish sculptures in American Craft magazine in 1996. And he admits he examined a Satava jellyfish sculpture that a customer brought him for repair in 1997.

Glass-in-glass sculpture is a centuries-old art form that consists of a glass sculpture inside a second glass layer, commonly called the shroud. The artist creates an inner glass sculpture and then dips it into molten glass, encasing it in a solid outer glass shroud. The shroud is malleable before it cools, and the artist can manipulate it into any shape he or she desires.

Satava filed suit against Lowry accusing him of copyright infringement. Satava requested, and the district court granted, a preliminary injunction, enjoining Lowry from making sculptures that resemble Satava’s. Lowry appealed to us.

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 finished "Narcissus," Butler said that they "might write an oratorio on some sacred subject"; and when Garnett asked whether they had anything in particular in mind, he replied that they were thinking of "The Woman Taken in Adultery." In the same decade he cheerfully applied for the Slade professorship of art at Cambridge; and he took credit for the rediscovery of a lost school of sculpture.

At the age of fifty-five he brushed up his Greek, which he "had not wholly forgotten," and read the "Odyssey" for the purposes of his oratorio, "Ulysses." When he got to Circe it suddenly flashed upon him that he was reading the work of a young woman! Thereupon he produced his book, "The Authoress of the Odyssey," with portrait of the authoress, Nausicaa, identification of her birthplace in Sicily, which pleased the Sicilians, and an account of the way in which she wrote her poem. It was the most startling literary discovery since Delia Bacon burst into the silent sea on which Colonel Fabyan of the biliteral cypher is the latest navigator. That the classical scholars laughed at or ignored him did not shake his belief that the work was as important as anything he had done. "Perhaps it was," he would have remarked, if any one else had written it. "I am a prose man," he wrote to Robert Bridges, "and, except Homer and Shakespeare"—he should have added Nausicaa—"I have read absolutely nothing of English poetry and very little of English prose." His inacquaint-

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 ance with English poetry, however, did not embarrass him, when, two years after bringing out his Sicilian authoress, he cleared up the mysteries of Shakespeare's sonnets. Nor did it prevent his dismissing the skeptical Dr. Furnivall, after a discussion at an A. B. C. shop, as a poor old incompetent. "Nothing," said Alethea Pontifex, speaking for her creator, "is well done nor worth doing unless, take it all around, it has come pretty easily." The poor old doctor, like the Greek scholars and the professional men of science, had blunted his wits by too much research.

Butler maintained that every man's work is a portrait of himself, and in his own case the features stand out ruggedly enough. Why should any one see in this infatuated pursuer of paradox a reincarnation of the pagan wisdom? In his small personal affairs he shows a certain old-maidish tidiness and the prudence of an experienced old bachelor, who manages his little pleasures without scandal. But in his intellectual life what vestige do we find of the Greek or even of the Roman sobriety, poise and decorum? In one respect Butler was conservative: he respected the established political and economic order. But he respected it only because it enabled him, without bestirring himself about his bread and butter, to sit quietly in his rooms at Clifford's Inn and invent attacks on every other form of orthodoxy. With a desire to be conspicuous only surpassed by his desire to be original he worked out the central Butlerian principle, videlicet: The fact that all the

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 best qualified judges agree that a thing is true and valuable establishes an overwhelming presumption that it is valueless and false. With his feet firmly planted on this grand radical maxim he employed his lively wit with lawyer-like ingenuity to make out a case against family life, of which he was incapable; against imaginative love, of which he was ignorant; against chivalry, otherwise the conventions of gentlemen, which he had but imperfectly learned; against Victorian men of letters, whom, by his own account, he had never read; against altruistic morality and the substance of Christianity, which were repugnant to his selfishness and other vices; against Victorian men of science, whose researches he had never imitated; and against Elizabethan and classical scholarship, which he took up in an odd moment as one plays a game of solitaire before going to bed. To his disciples he could not bequeath his cleverness; but he left them his recipe for originality, his manners, and his assurance, which has been gathering compound interest ever since. In the original manuscript of "Alps and Sanctuaries" he consigned "Raffaele, along with Socrates, Virgil [the last two displaced later by Plato and Dante], Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Goethe, Beethoven, and another, to limbo as the Seven Humbugs of Christendom." Who was the unnamed seventh?

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In this world where, as he was to discover, "nothing is allowed and everything is done," Disraeli was born in 1804, and flourished—flourished is the word—continuously from 1826 till 1881. Certain pairs of celebrities are linked like Alpine climbers; so that if one slips into the crevasse of oblivion, the other pulls him out. Three or four years ago I mentioned to a friend of strongly conservative faith that I was reading Morley's "Gladstone," being at the time midway in the second thick volume of that intricate and austere record of parliamentary combinations and cabinet councils, and perhaps rather proud of my progress.

"You will never finish it," he said. Instantly he added, "Monypenny's 'Disraeli' is another matter."

I smiled and thought otherwise. For I had always admired the high moral seriousness of both Gladstone and his biographer, and had copied into my notebook abundance of the Grand Old Man's injunctions of this order: "Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean

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 and grovelling thing that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated and noble destiny."

Now Gladstone, whose influence upon the tone of public life was, as I still believe, far more elevating and ennobling than Disraeli's, was characterized by Disraeli as "a sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity." Disraeli himself spoke of life as a "dazzling farce" and an engrossing "game." One does not quite like the gamester's attitude in a statesman. Disraeli was animated, at least in his earlier years, by a peacock vanity. Carlyle had taught us to think of him as a "superlative Hebrew conjurer," to be disdained even by a conservative, provided he were a serious and sober conservative. It was my impression that "Dizzy" and his literary works were dead, and well dead, and that it would never be really necessary to return to them.

But my friend was right. I left Gladstone at the end of the second volume; and my intention of reading the third volume is still serving as pavement in an overpaved place. Eventually I turned to Disraeli. Everyone was doing so, usually with a contemptuous fling at Gladstone, which pricked curiosity.

When I began the Monypenny-Buckle "Life of Benjamin Disraeli," I repeated, in little, the experience of his own contemporaries; and this is clearly a tribute to the biographers' dispassionate, gradual, exhaustive elaboration of their hero. I contemned him, I ridiculed him, I disapproved of

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 him, I compared his character unfavorably with that of his liberal adversary Gladstone and with that of his Tory leader Lord Derby. I distrusted him. Yet all the while I was amused, astonished, delighted, mystified, impressed, and never wearied by him. And I read straight through the six volumes of the Life—interspersing the novels at suitable points—with only a little flagging in the middle, with vivid interest in the final volume, to the victorious and triumphant end. And now I strangely sympathize with the English lady who was asked which she would prefer as a husband, Disraeli or Gladstone. With feelings mixed but not altogether muddled, she replied that she would prefer to be married to Gladstone but in the first year to elope with Disraeli.

To say, as has been said, that Gladstone possessed all the virtues and Disraeli all the charms, may account for the duplicity of the English lady's feelings; but it is too simple to explain, for example, the immense vogue of Disraeli's novels in America at a period when the type of society which they exhibited and the political party which they seemed to support were peculiarly obnoxious to the main current of American sentiment. Disraeli, delighted by the splendor of a life in the historic grand style and dreaming of a theocratic polity and an aristocratic renascence, despised the American scene

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 and American institutions as affording no adequate theatre and no adequate rewards for great actors.

Yet multitudes of sober-suited American equalitarians read his duke-thronged novels and followed his parliamentary opposition to "democracy," as they had previously followed Frederick the Great and Napoleon, as they were soon to follow Bismarck, as they were later to follow William II—with fascinated interest and secret iniquitous adoration. When in his old age he came home from the Congress of Berlin, flushed with his great diplomatic victory, having manifestly maneuvred the spoils of the Russo-Turkish War from the very paws of the Russian Bear, even Lowell's old contempt for "Dizzy" struggled vainly against his new admiration. "I think," he said, "if Beaconsfield weren't a Jew, people would think him rather fine." Bismarck, who had studied with the keen, hard eye of a Real-Politiker all the celebrated contestants at that famous jousting, remarked without qualification: "Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann. . . ." (the old Jew, he is the man that understands the realities in the situation and deals with them effectively).

Bismarck frankly admired, most of us furtively admire, men who get what they go after, whatever it is. Though the better part of mankind respects principles, the greater part of mankind responds, in spite of principles, with the deep ungovernable applause of its primitive nature to exhibitions of successful power. Something within us instinctively

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 murmurs: "Beautiful is virtue, and charm is ingratiating; but power, after all, is the source of all the charms and all the virtues, without which all the virtues and all the charms are but idle attitudes and futile gesticulations." Disraeli refreshes, delights and inspirits us because his life is a perpetually varied exhibition of successful power, in literature, in society, in politics—power overcoming difficulties, surmounting obstacles, setting itself almost inaccessible objectives, and attaining them by fertile resources and indefatigable tenacity. The pursuit of power and its perquisites and its glories was Disraeli's religion. It is one manifestation of his spirit which is untainted with a touch of insincerity. It is the dominating passion that unifies his life and illuminates all that is mysterious and paradoxical in his utterances and in his career.

The critic who centres his attention on the old prime minister, Earl of Beaconsfield and lord of Hughenden Manor, may attempt a unification by thinking of him as essentially a natural born Tory and, as Mr. Buckle calls him, an "aristocrat to the bone." It will not do. No one can dissipate the "mystery" of Disraeli who forgets for a moment that he was, like the first Napoleon, an adventurer risen from the people. What does he prove—that the aristocratic system welcomes such men as Disraeli, or that the aristocratic system can't keep such

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 men out? His career on the whole impresses a Liberal less as a glory of the conservative principle than as a bewildering satire upon it. When he had chosen his part, he played it, to be sure, superbly, upholding as loyally as the bluest-blooded of old English nobles the prerogatives of the Crown, the prestige of the Church, the privileges of Parliament, and the predominance of the landed gentry. And yet behind the sallow mask, decorous and immobile, of the Earl of Beaconsfield who had refused a dukedom, there was seldom absent a suggestion of silent, mocking Semitic laughter. Says Bertie Tremaine in "Endymion," the last novel of one whose deadly banter had made him minister: "Men destined to the highest places should beware of badinage. . . . An insular country subject to fogs, and with a powerful middle class, requires grave statesmen. "Now, the best place from which to laugh at Bourbons is their throne.

Disraeli was not born an English Tory. He was born an emancipated Jew, the son of an emancipated Jew. His father Isaac, the literary antiquarian, had withdrawn from business because it bored him, had withdrawn from the synagogue because it annoyed him, had baptized his children because conformity was convenient, and had kept out of politics and other engagements in order to enjoy in the isolation of his rich library the free play of his curious, volatile, speculative mind. By his intellectual detachment, if not by his universal knowledge, he might have served as a model for the omniscient Sidonia

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 of "Coningsby." Benjamin inherited from his father the volatile, speculative mind, with an additional tincture of Voltairean wit. His free intelligence sported throughout his life with a flame-like swiftness and levity over and under the surface of all things, human and divine. It is a charm of Disraeli and the secret of his pervasive and savory irony that his intellect never conformed, never lost its quick untrammeled lambency—that it remained to the end the most mobile of all earthy types of mind, the absolutely aweless intellect of the emancipated Jew.

In the composition of the son there was a fiery element, not present in the father, namely, a romantic imagination, which had been stirred by the French Revolution, colored by the romances of Scott, and kindled to a flame by the poetry of Shelley, and by the poetry, the picturesque travels, and the social celebrity of Lord Byron. As a boy in his teens, Benjamin attended with his father the publisher Murray's literary dinners; and among his earliest jottings is a record of a conversation between him and Tom Moore with regard to Byron who was then, 1822, in exile. The effect of these various stimuli upon his lively sensibility was to make him for the time being a literary and political radical, for a long time to come a Byronist in his moods and manners, and perhaps for the rest of his life something of a Byronist in his inexhaustible appetite for celebrity, for being conspicuous, for making an impression. He was to declare later that "a great

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 man is one who affects the mind of his generation." His own experience proved to him that an imaginative writer who molds the purposes of young men entering their majority governs them as truly as the statesman who taxes their incomes.

Byron died in 1824. Disraeli "carried on" in 1826 by publishing at twenty-one his first novel, "Vivian Grey," in which the hero, meditating a career in Parliament, thinks "Don Juan" may serve as a model for his style in the Commons, Milton in the House of Lords. He introduced Byron as Apollo in his delectable skit "Ixion in Heaven" and as Lord Cadurcis in "Venetia." Travelling through the East in imitation of his predecessor, he conceived his "Revolutionary Epick," with its apotheosis of Napoleon, at a Byronic moment, "standing," as he tells us, with full sense of the romantic magnificence of his posture, "upon Asia, and gazing upon Europe with the broad Hellespont alone between us, and the shadow of night descending on the mountains." He carried on by returning to England smoking a chibouk in token of his oriental sojourn. He wrote oriental tales. He thought himself a great poet afflicted with a hopeless woe. He indulged in gloomy vapors and in outbursts of cynicism. He solaced himself with the society of fair women, with whom he quarreled melodramatically and whom he flattered extravagantly and successfully. He anticipated the sallies of Whistler and Wilde by remarking to a host who had praised his own wine at a dinner party and boasted that he had

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 wine twenty times as good in the cellar: "No doubt, no doubt, but my dear fellow, this is quite good enough for such canaille as you have got to-day." He carried on the Byronic dandyism as a readily available means of imposing upon the imagination of his time. As late as 1833, he is described as appearing at a dinner in "a black velvet coat lined with satin; purple trousers with a gold band running down the outside seam, a scarlet waistcoat, long lace ruffles, falling down to the tips of his fingers, white gloves, with several brilliant rings outside them, and long black ringlets rippling down upon his shoulder."

The inside of his romantic ostentation at the age of twenty-nine, his clear-eyed egotism, the anguish of his ambition, the drive and direction of his lust for power, are revealed in a fragment of the journal that he kept in 1833:

My life has not been a happy one. Nature has iven me an awful ambition and fiery passions. My life has been a struggle, with moments of rapture—a storm with dashes of moonlight—Love, Poetry. . . . I make it a rule never to throw myself open to men. I do not grudge them the knowledge I could impart but I am always exhausted by composition when I enter society, and little inclined to talk, and as I never get anything in return, I do not think the exertion necessary. . ..

The world calls me conceited. The world is in error. I trace all the blunders of my life to sacrificing my own opinion to that of others. . . . I have an unerring instinct—I can read characters at

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 a glance; few men can deceive me. My mind is a continental mind. It is a revolutionary mind. I am only truly great in action. If ever I am placed in a truly eminent position I shall prove this. I could rule the House of Commons, although there would be a great prejudice against me at first. . . The fixed character of our English society, the consequence of our aristocratic institutions, renders a career difficult.

Poetry is the safety-valve of my passions but I wish to act what I write. My works are the embodiment of my feelings. In Vivian Grey I have portrayed my active and real ambition. The Psychological Romance ("Contarini Fleming") is a development of my poetic character.

Every stroke of this veracious prophecy, this astonishing piece of self-delineation, lays bare with precision the excited nervous system of his genius; but let us pause to develop a little one remarkable sentence: "I have a revolutionary mind." At the time this passage was written, Disraeli was brooding upon his poem on Napoleon, which, as he conceived it, was to celebrate the spirit of his own time as the "Divine Comedy" had celebrated the Catholic Middle Ages, and as Milton's work had celebrated the consequences of the Reformation. "Since the revolt of America," he writes in December, 1833, "a new principle has been at work in the world, to which I trace all that occurs. This is the Revolutionary principle, and this is what I wish to embody

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 in the Revolutionary Epick." He goes on to explain that he has the Feudal Genius and the Federal or Democratic Genius appear before the Omnipotent to plead their respective causes. The Omnipotent declares that "a man is born of supernatural energies and that whichever side he embraces will succeed [my italics]. The man is Napoleon, just about to conquer Italy. . . . He adopts the Federal or Democratic side."

It is obvious that at this period Disraeli thought of himself also as a man of "supernatural energies," and that he, too, heard the Omnipotent Power whispering in his ear that whichever side he embraced would succeed. It is equally obvious that the modernity of his intelligence, coupled with his immense self-confidence and his lack of any inherited position in the "feudal" ranks, powerfully suggested his espousing the cause of democracy. It is obvious from the following passage in "Coningsby," that ten years later he still regarded wealth and hereditary rank with the eyes of an intellectual radical and revolutionary:

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 In the year of the great Reform Bill, 1832, Disraeli, still sympathetic with reform, refused to inscribe himself a member of the Conservative Club and declined being returned for a Tory borough. In 1834, it was a Liberal minister, Melbourne, offering to assist him and asking him where his ambition lay—it was a Liberal minister whom he astounded by declaring that he wished to be prime minister. Yet in 1837, when at last he entered Parliament, he entered as a member of the Conservative party. Why, after his initial appearance as a Radical and a Reformer, did he finally throw his "supernatural energies" into the "Feudal" cause?

The reasons are not one but many. First and foremost, his desire to "rule the House of Commons" quite transcended his interest in either of the parties. Secondly, after repeated failures to break into Parliament as an independent, he discovered that he should never get in without party support. Thirdly, toward the end of 1834 he formed a strong personal attachment to Lord Lyndhurst, which led to the establishment of Conservative connections. Fourthly, the Whig Government, which at the passing of the Reform Bill had expected to last "forever," began in 1834 to break up, and the Tory prospects to brighten. Fifthly, the Philosophic Radicals of the Bentham and Mill type were as antipathetic to him as they were to Carlyle: they were too dryly rational, they dwelt too much in the thin air of abstract rights, they were "logic-chopping doctrinaires." "The Utilitarians in politics," he

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 said in 1883, "are like the Unitarians in religion; both omit imagination in their systems, and imagination governs mankind." Sixthly, the more Disraeli saw of high-bred Tories in London society and especially in their country houses, the more obvious it became to him that there was a vacancy in their ranks which his brains could fill. With the impressionable eye of an artist, he looked on the garter and riband and golden fleece of the Duke of Wellington, and saw how he could use such trappings to govern men through their imaginations.

His choice reminds one a little of a famous philosopher who at the most radical moment of his career decided upon the most moderate course of conduct. Descartes tells us with almost impenetrable irony in his "Discourse on Method," that when he arrived at his intellectual maturity he resolved to denude himself utterly of all past beliefs and in naked simplicity to seek the truth that was in him. But he hastens to add that expediency dictated his conforming in politics, religion, etc., to those with whom he should have to live. He adopted further the maxim that he was to be as firm and resolute in his actions as he was able, and "not to adhere less steadfastly to the most doubtful opinions, when once adopted, than if they had been highly certain." In such wise and in such a mood did the emancipated Jewish intelligence of Disraeli wrap the mantle of English Toryism about the naked sincerity of his approach to power.

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He wore his Tory mantle with a difference, for, as we have seen, he had a taste for a certain distinction, for a certain splendor, in his attire. He soon proposed a renovation of the old garment. He conceived a Young England, a new Toryism, of novel cut and arresting color, with a substance of modern philosophical weaving but embroidered with traditions and adorned with antique jewels, which should impose upon the imagination of beholders as his own personal raiment did, when in his gaudy youth he walked in such glory that the crowds gave way, "like the Red Sea," before him. Accordingly he harked back to the Stuarts for a theory of the royal prerogative as the diamond brooch for his mantle; he laced and braided it with the golden popular monarchism of Bolingbroke's dream and with the hierarchical conceptions of Burke's historical philosophy; he re-enforced it with the antiliberalism of Newman, the High Church revival and Catholic reaction of the eighteen-thirties; but the main stuff and the pattern were suggestive of the greatest living tailor to the Tories, Thomas Carlyle, the romantic and radical designer of the aristocracy of talent, the loyal subjection of the populace, and the imperial destiny of the English. When Disraeli became a professing Tory, he closed his Byron and opened his Carlyle.

His rôle was now to act upon the English stage the part of an arch-aristocrat of talent with such

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 manifold arts and graces as to persuade the people that the Tory party was the truly national, the truly progressive, the truly popular party. His rôle was to wean the popular ear from Bright and Cobden and Gladstone, who went storming through the provinces on what he derisively called "passionate pilgrimages," crying up the "nostrums" of liberty and equality, and preaching such perilous doctrines as man's moral right to the ballot, Italy's moral right to nationality, and England's moral duty toward peoples subject to the Turkish sword. His rôle was to teach the country to chant after him the new Tory catchwords: "The splendor of the Crown, the lustre of the Peerage, the privileges of the Commons, the rights of the poor."

It was his business also to give as much reality to these conceptions as possible. I fear it cannot be shown that he took a very effective interest in the "rights of the poor," though he had a hand in conceding their political enfranchisement, driven to the measure by the tactics of the Opposition. Much has been made of the sympathy he exhibited for the wretched condition of the miners by writing his novel "Sybil," what though he voted against mine inspection to show his sympathy for his friend Lord Londonderry, who was a mine owner. He proved his respect for talent by putting his private secretary and his solicitor into the peerage. But his really conspicuous masterpieces of statesmanship were performed to enhance the splendor of the Crown. By purchasing the Egyptian shares in the Suez Canal

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 he made straight the British highway into the Orient. He presided over the White Man, taking up his burden in South Africa and Afghanistan. He presented to his royal mistress as the most substantial of his magnificent compliments the title of Empress of India. And when that pious and patriotic lady, whose conceptions of the royal prerogative he had incessantly fostered and flattered—when that excitable lady repeatedly cracked the whip over him and his recalcitrantly pacific cabinet and threatened to resign her "crown of thorns" if he did not act, Disraeli at last girded up his old loins; sent a confidential threat of war to St. Petersburg; marched to Berlin; forced Russia to withdraw from Constantinople, to restore the outraged Christians to the Turk, and her Slavic friends to Austrian auspices; and so by a right John-Bullish settlement of a European problem laid a firm foundation for the war of 1914.

There are, of course, sacrifices to be made and embarrassments to be undergone by a Jewish radical but one generation removed from the merchant class, who becomes champion of the "gentlemen of England." It did very well for Disraeli to insist in his fashion that the new Toryism was to be unselfish, comprehensive, national. But it became his duty, as a practical politician bent upon overthrowing the "Whig oligarchy," to turn a disdainful back to his

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 own class, to play the ends against the middle, to court the aristocracy and to flatter the peasantry, who, as he regretted to observe, were beginning to call themselves "labourers" and to form unions and to fraternize with the insolent middle class and to harken to middle class orators, instead of looking to the game-preserving lords of their land, as in the good old days of the Stuarts.

As leader of the country gentry, it behooved him to follow their ancient and honorable custom and occupation of "owning land." This was a rather serious responsibility for one whose chief accumulations consisted of an enormous mass of debts, on which he was paying extortionate interest, when he was not dodging his creditors and the bailiffs. But the man had genius. He married a coquettish widow who made him a "perfect wife," and also brought him £5,000 a year. He entered into a romantic correspondence with an eccentric lady of seventy or eighty who presently died leaving him a legacy of £30,000. He wrote a life of Lord George Bentinck, for which some interested person rewarded him in lordly fashion. Another admirer took charge of all his debts and apparently lent him unlimited thousands at two per cent. He never was out of debt, but with these helps and windfalls, and with the income of his offices and novels and his paternal inheritance, he managed eventually to possess and occupy, if not perfectly to own, land enough with manor, parks, timberland, peacocks, etc., to support the dignity of an English earl.

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 To touch on the economic aspects of Disraeli's adventure is to hint at a "seamy side" of life in the grand style, at what might have been, for a tender economic conscience, a kind of sham and ignominy embittering the external show. But Disraeli's conscience was not tender. Perhaps it had been toughened by recollection of the debts of other great prime ministers. Perhaps it had been prepared, spiritually prepared, by Lord Byron, who had looked at these pecuniary matters in a cool realistic way, or, as we should say nowadays, in a Butlerian way:

Toughness, tenacity, relentless aggressiveness, and a diabolically cool remorseless wit had characterized Disraeli's approach to power in Parliament. According to his reputation and his record, copiously illustrated in the "Life," he was one of the most finished and formidable debaters who ever rose in the House. A great part of his forty years of public life he was in Opposition; and the business of an Opposition, as his biographer reminds us, is to oppose. At this task he was a matchless master. When he had perfected his style, his favorite technique at the crucial points of his philippics was in the manner of Tybalt's sword play: One! Two!—a flourish of a cambric handkerchief—and the third

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 in your bosom! He cut up a great minister at his appointed hour with the apparent nonchalance of an epicure dismembering a quail. He studied invective like a fine art. While the victim twitched and paled, he launched his barbed and icy sarcasms with a finely precalculated murderous precision. When he himself was attacked, he sat immobile, impassive, impervious, or with head sunk on bosom, feigning indifference or sleep. He had the gift of making his silence ominous, his repose sphinxlike, sinister. In action, by the sheer thrust and flashing velocity of his edged intellect he dazzled his hearers till slower-witted men gave way before him and fell behind and followed him, as one falls behind a dangerous weapon.

Opportunist to the finger tips, he treated party "principles" as but expedients to be retained or discarded with reference to their utility in getting the government out and himself and his friends in. If a Liberal ministry became warlike and used a "strong hand" in China, he immediately became pacific and humane. But if Gladstone raised a humanitarian cry over Bulgarian atrocities, Disraeli remarked that the worst of the atrocities was Gladstone's pamphlet, and he spoke in Parliament with such playful levity of the massacre of ten or twenty thousand unarmed peasants that he fairly exposed himself to the charge of inhuman callousness. As advocate for the landed interest, he supported, in Opposition, the nefarious Corn Laws. But the very principle of Protection, which he employed with

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 dramatic and ruthless force to destroy Peel, his former leader, who had abandoned it, he himself stealthily abandoned as soon as the work of destruction was accomplished, thus exactly duplicating the "treachery" with which he had charged the man whom he displaced, and proving that a practical politician is one who repeats the sins of his predecessor. In the course of his assault, he seems, as his biographer admits, to have lied deliberately and solemnly, to the House full of the "gentlemen of England," in denying that he had sought office under Peel. In 1865 he solemnly warned the House against sanctioning any "step that has a tendency to democracy"; for Lord Russell was pressing for an extension of the suffrage. But two years later, he himself strode toward democracy—or, as Carlyle screamed in septuagenarian panic, "leaped Niagara"—by putting through the Reform of 1867, which emancipated the lower as the legislation of 1832 had emancipated the middle class. Such things occur when a born revolutionary in a Tory mantle advances on power with perfect inflexibility of purpose and perfect mobility of principle.

Guizot said to Disraeli on his accession to acknowledged leadership: "I think your being the leader of the Tory party is the greatest triumph that Liberalism has ever achieved." Guizot was clairvoyant in perceiving the joke on the country gentry involved in their accepting the guidance of this radical mind; but he perhaps overstated the "triumph" of Liberalism in the ambiguous position

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 and conduct of its "lost leader." Disraeli did indeed do something to liberalize the institutions of England and to prepare the way for that radically free aristocracy which his free Jewish intellect approved as the ideal form of society, as the truly conservative form. But he lowered the tone of his leadership, he corrupted the influence which he exerted upon his generation, by his public subscription to outworn conservative cant, by sacrificing his professed principles to momentary expediencies, by seeming always to yield to the pressure of liberal circumstances and the deep liberal current of the time grudgingly, fatalistically, cynically. The politician and the statesman ring hollow, like something which resembles an Ionic column of Ferrara but is really a stucco-coated contrivance of lath and plaster. Gladstone and Wordsworth were right when they agreed that "a man's personal character ought to be the basis of his politics." Disraeli's politics were not grounded squarely upon that basis.

Let us acknowledge that in this case the duplicity of the statesman is the peculiar spice of the novelist, and that our generation is just beginning to recognize how spicy Disraeli's novels are. Professor Saintsbury gives them but a paragraph in his history of literature in the nineteenth century; yet he remarks significantly that "good judges, differing widely in political and literary tastes, have found

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 themselves at one as to the strange way in which the reader comes back to them as he advances in life.' What the mature reader discovers as he returns to them in that the purple of the purpurei panni is frequently finely royal; that the characterization, especially in the later books, is often masterly and occasionally exquisitely fine; that there are abundant passages of noble feeling and delicate sentiment; that the numberless epigrams which stud the pages from the exuberant "Vivian Grey" to the mellow sobriety of "Endymion" are not merely brilliant but increasingly sage, weighty with an experience in public affairs and in the society of the "great world" such as no other English novelist has enjoyed, wise with the distilled wisdom of native insight and of prolonged critical reflection upon the ways of human nature. But, above all, one discovers that these novels are far more subtle than a first reading revealed and far more deeply saturated with irony than most of Disraeli's contemporaries suspected.

In his lifetime his books were generally received and labeled as "fashionable novels," and as such they have come down to us. Their piquancy in their day seems to have consisted largely in the fact that many of the characters were understood to be portraits of contemporary celebrities, as indeed they were. To assist in the identification of the originals, the curious were provided with a "key." But that was comparatively puerile sport. The only true key, the master key, to the Disraelian

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 fiction is such an insight into the personality of the author as one derives from passing back and forth between the novels and the Monypenny-Buckle biography, keeping always in mind this remark of St. Aldegonde in "Lothair":

The inexhaustible fun which Disraeli offers to the student consists in contrasting the nervous, subtle, highly civilized intellectual that he was with the representative English country gentleman that he affected to be. The moment one enters into it, one is on the trail of Disraeli's own fun in life and in fiction. One perceives with fresh vividness that his grand society, his dukes and duchesses, his lords and ladies, and the entire bag and baggage of his traditional Tory system are riddled with his own Voltairean satire, are ablaze with his own sense of their comedy. The "Young Duke," whose coming of age "creates almost as great a sensation among the aristocracy of England as the Norman Conquest;" Lord Monmouth, who leaves his immense fortune to his natural daughter by an actress of the Théâtre Français; St. Aldegonde, who travels, by Jove, "three hundred miles for a slice of cod and a beefsteak"—these and countless other noble beings are pictured for derision. What the real Disraeli

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 thought of the profuse and idle minions of splendor who paraded his pages he actually put into the mouth of Millbank, the Manchester manufacturer in "Coningsby":

Disraeli, like all of the "dark sex," was sensible to "female loveliness;" but probably no Jewish intellectual who ever lived could long be dazzled by good looks in a man, when unaccompanied by adequate mental equipment. Of Lord Deloraine, the gartered viceroy in "Sybil," he remarks demurely: "He might have been selected as the personification of aristocracy: so noble was his appearance. . . . He was also very accomplished and not ill-informed; had read a little, and thought a little, and was in every respect a superior man." Superior he was, presumably, to the Warwickshire peer in the same novel, who had thought not at all, and who, when confronted with the idea of social betterment, gasped indignantly: "Well, that is sheer radicalism—pretending that the people can be better off than they are, is radicalism and nothing else." Everyone

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 will recall Arnold's remark about the "cock of Lord Elcho's hat" being "quite the finest thing we have." Disraeli parallels that vein of irony in "Lothair," where Mr. Phoebus extols the preoccupation of the aristocracy with the things of the body:

Even more deliciously mischievous toward the conservative principle and order which Disraeli professed to uphold, is the following bit of dialogue from "Endymion":

"How can any government go on without the support of the Church and the land?" cries Zenobia, the ruling lady among the Tories. "It is quite unnatural."

"That is the mystery," remarks the ambassador. "Here is a government, supported by none of the influences hitherto deemed indispensable, and yet it exists."

Someone remarks that the newspapers are behind it and the Dissenters, etc., and, "Then there is always a number of people who will support any government—and so the thing works."

"They have a new name for this hybrid sentiment," says the ambassador. "They call it public opinion."

"How very absurd!" Zenobia exclaims, "a mere

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 VAN NOSTRAND SCIENCE SERIES.

No. 102 50 Cts.

THE GALVANIC

CIRCUIT INVESTIGATED

MATHEMATICALLY

BY

DR. G. S. OHM

BERLIN, 1827

TRANSLATED BY WILLIAM FRANCIS

STUDENT IN PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN

WITH A PREFACE BY THE EDITOR

THOMAS D. LOCKWOOD, M.I.E.E.

AND

VICE PRESIDENT OF THE AM. INST. OF ELECTRICAL

ENGINEERS

NEW YORK

D. VAN NOSTRAND COMPANY

28 MURRAY AND 27 WARREN STREETS

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 nickname. As if there could be any opinion but that of the Sovereign and the two Houses of Parliament."

Now turn from this stiff Zenobian orthodoxy of Toryism to Disraeli himself as he exhibits, in private letters of 1862-3 addressed to Mrs. Willyams, his instinctive, spontaneous response of delight to the play of revolutionary power:

Mr. Disraeli, commoner, glows, at the age of fifty-eight, at thought of a great adventure which fails to stir his young friend, the noble lord. It is an of the never quenched Napoleonic passion of his youth. It is an expression of a pure personal impulse to rule, with a sense that the power is in himself, a sense which is always accompanied by a certain tendency to regard parliamentary procedure impatiently and all the talk of either Whigs or Tories as but "eternal palaver." In his stronger imaginative moods, Disraeli becomes sin-

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 cerely eloquent in praise of the aspiring will, the spirit behind the forms and shows of things, which saved him and his hero Coningsby from "profligacy" on the one hand and from "pedantry" on the other—

The tragedy of the romantic dreamer and intellectual who seeks in action to embody his dream, is to discover with Sybil that "great thoughts have very little to do with the business of the world; that human affairs, even in an age of revolution, are the subject of compromise; and that the essence of compromise is littleness." The decrepit power which the radical had been taught existed only by sufferance Disraeli discovered, as Sybil discovered, "was compact and organized, with every element of physical power at its command, and supported by the interests, the sympathies, the honest convictions, and the strong prejudices of classes influential not merely from their wealth but even by their numbers." He had thought himself "a man of destiny;" he was to find, like Prince Florestan in "Endymion,"

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 that the "irresistible principle of historical necessity" was a principle "not recognized by Her Majesty's Ministers!"

There speaks the man who recognized the realities in the situation at the Congress of Berlin. From the novels, let us return once more to the biography, to the final volume, for a last specimen of the Disraelian irony playing upon himself and at the sare time upon the great German master of the arts which he himself practised. England, as part o: her share of the plunder divided by the victorious statesmen—England, or rather Disraeli personally, had secretly seized upon Cyprus; and in a confidential interview with the "honest broker" had communicated the fact to Bismarck. I quote the passage in which Disraeli reports this interview to his sovereign:

"His idea of progress was evidently seizing something." Evidently Disraeli's idea of progress was not precisely that. The Bismarckian point of view and personality interested him, to be sure, piquantly. He was mildly amused by the "iron" statesman's table talk, with its "Rabelaisian monologues." He was astounded by his "endless revelations of things

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 he ought not to mention." He was struck by the "ogre-like form" and pleased by the contrasting voice, "which is sweet and gentle." But the effect of Bismarck's fundamental conceptions upon his subtly civilized Semitic mind was that of something elementary, crude, barbaric. With an exquisite shade of sarcasm, he hints, just hints, at this effect, to his queen. For he knows that in the veins of his "adored" sovereign runs, after all, the same Teutonic blood, beating to the same barbaric rhythm. Had she not, in order to quicken the cooler blood of her dear Lord Beaconsfield in the months preceding the Congress—had she not written to him with her own royal hand that, if she were a man, "she would like to go and give those Russians such a beating!" He was her minister to do her good pleasure. And so, with a merciless diplomatic craft, which is the full intellectual "equivalent" of war, he gave those Russians "such a beating." He added Cyprus to her Crown. He played for her, with an intimate consciousness of its absurdity, the great game, which, along with shooting pheasants and horse racing, still delights the rude imaginations of these occidentals!

His action was, as Bismarck had predicted that it would be, popular—immensely popular. Der alte Jude was rewarded by a grateful sovereign with an English earldom. He now took a place of eminence and splendor in that order which his radical spokesman in "Sybil" had declared "stands before Europe the most gorgeous of existing spectacles,"

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 governing "the most miserable people on the face of the globe." With the loyalty to the temporal power characteristic of his race, he had rendered to Cæsar such service as Cæsar prizes. Judging by the standards of the people among whom he lived, his life, as he declared near the end of his tenure of it, had not been altogether vanity.

Yet in the end one recognizes regretfully in the man reserves of power of another sort, which his occasions never fully called forth, and potentialities of influence which his political choices made unavailing. He himself recognized them, when in his seventy-sixth year he abandoned the premiership for "Endymion." One likes to think of his return upon himself in his penultimate spring, when the days "were getting very long, and soft, and sweet," and he lay under the purple oaks of Hughenden, among his loved violets and primroses, lost in the fathomless revery of which he was capable—"one of those reveries when the incidents of our existence are mapped before us, when each is considered with relation to the rest, and assumes in our knowledge its destined and absolute position; when, as it were, we take stock of our experience, and ascertain how rich sorrow and pleasure, feeling and thought, intercourse with our fellow creatures and the fortuitous mysteries of life, have made us in wisdom." In those last calm days of illumination and quiet retrospection, what, one wonders, was his final judgment upon the ancient wisdom of his own race, when, secure in the sense of its spiritual supremacy and

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 refusing to contend with the Napoleons and Czsars of the "impious younger world."

What if, like the saints and martyrs whose heroic spirit really touched his imagination, he had declined the handful of silver, the riband to stick in his coat, and had undertaken the spiritual recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, a mission with which his Tancred trifles? "Strange power of the world," he exclaims with the insight of one who has yielded to it, "that the moment we enter it, our great conceptions dwarf!" Sympathy with the world dwarfs our dream in youth. The "sense of the ridiculous" dwarfs it in age. There was too much of Lucian, too much of Voltaire, too much of Don Juan, too much of Heine, and, above all, too much of the hard radical realism of Napoleon in Disraeli, for a saint. At the end of every aspiring flight, he returns to earth; he takes his stand on human nature as it is, not as the dreamer conceives it ought to be. And he concludes, with a richly experienced smile: "Perhaps these reveries of solitude may not be really great conceptions; perhaps they are only exaggerations; vague, indefinite, shadowy, founded on no sound principles, founded on no assured basis." Perhaps the world is right; and the beatific vision, only a dyspeptic dream.

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The correspondence of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, if approached merely as a chapter in the biographies of these heroes of nineteenth century letters, is sufficiently rewarding. In a relationship extending over twelve years, including the trying period of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, these extraordinary personalities disclose the aspects of their diverse natures which are best worth the remembrance of posterity. However her passionate and erratic youth may have captivated our grandfathers, George Sand in the mellow autumn of her life is for us at her most attractive phase. The storms and anguish and hazardous adventures that attended the defiant unfolding of her spirit are over. In her final retreat at Nohant, surrounded by her affectionate children and grandchildren, diligently writing, botanizing, bathing in her little river, visited by her friends and undistracted by the fiery lovers of the old time, she shows an unguessed wealth of maternal virtue, swift, comprehending sympathy, fortitude, sunny resignation, and a goodness of heart that has ripened into wis-

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 dom. For Flaubert, too, though he was seventeen years her junior, the flamboyance of youth was long since past; in 1863, when the correspondence begins, he was firmly settled, a shy, proud, grumpy, toiling hermit of forty, in his family seat at Croisset, beginning his seven years' labor at L'Education Sentimentale, master of his art, hardening in his convictions, and conscious of increasing estrangement from the spirit of his age. He, with his craving for sympathy, and she, with her inexhaustible supply of it, meet; he pours out his bitterness, she her consolation; and so with equal candor of self-revelation they beautifully draw out and strengthen each the other's characteristics, and help one another grow old.

But there is more in these letters than a satisfaction for the biographical appetite, which, indeed, finds its account rather in the earlier chapters of the correspondents' history. What impresses us here is the banquet spread for the reflective and critical faculties in this intercourse of natural antagonists. As M. Faguet observes in a striking paragraph of his study of Flaubert:

"It is a curious thing, which does honor to them both, that Flaubert and George Sand should have become loving friends towards the end of their lives. At the beginning, Flaubert might have been looked upon by George Sand as a furious enemy. Emma (Madame Bovary) is George Sand's heroine with all the poetry turned into ridicule. Flaubert seems to say in every page of his work: 'Do you want to know what is the real Valentine, the real

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 Indiana, the real Lelia? Here she is, it is Emma Roualt.' 'And do you want to know what becomes of a woman whose education has consisted in George Sand's books? Here she is, Emma Roualt.' So that the terrible mocker of the bourgeois has written a book which is directly inspired by the spirit of the 1840 bourgeois. Their recriminations against romanticism 'which rehabilitates and poetises the courtesan,' against George Sand, the Muse of Adultery, are to be found in acts and facts in Madame Bovary."

Now, the largest interest of this correspondence depends precisely upon the continuance, beneath an affectionate personal relationship, of a fundamental antagonism of interests and beliefs, resolutely maintained on both sides. George Sand, with her lifelong passion for propaganda and reformation, labors earnestly to bring Flaubert to her point of view, to remold him nearer to her heart's desire. He, with a playful deference to the sex and years of his friend, addresses her in his letters as "Dear Master." Yet in the essentials of the conflict, though she never gives over her effort, he never budges a jot; he has taken his ground, and in his last unfinished work, Bouvard and Pécuchet, he dies stubbornly fortifying his position. To the last she speaks from a temperament lyrical, sanguine, imaginative, optimistic, and sympathetic; he from a temperament dramatic, melancholy, observing, cynical, and satirical. She insists upon natural goodness; he, upon innate depravity. She urges her faith in social regeneration; he vents his splenetic contempt

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 for the mob. Through all the successive shocks of disillusioning experience, she expects the renovation of humanity by some religious, some semi-mystical, amelioration of its heart; he grimly concedes the greater part of humanity to the devil, and can see no escape for the remnant save in science and aristocratic organization. For her, finally, the literary art is an instrument of social salvation—it is her means of touching the world with her ideals, her love, her aspiration; for him the literary art is the avenue of escape from the meaningless chaos of existence—it is his implicitly critical condemnation of the world.

The origins of these unreconciled antipathies lie deep beneath the personal relationship of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert; lie deep beneath their successors, who with more or less of amenity in their manners are still debating the same questions to-day. The main currents of the nineteenth century, with fluent and refluent tides, clash beneath the controversy; and as soon as one hears its "long withdrawing roar," and thinks it is dying away, and is become a part of ancient history, it begins again, and will be heard, no doubt, by the last man, as a solemn accompaniment to his final contention with his last adversary.

George Sand was, on the whole, a natural and filial daughter of the French Revolution. The royal blood which she received from her father's line mingled in her veins with that of the Parisian milliner, her mother, and predestined her for a

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 leveler by preparing in her an instinctive ground of revolt against all those inherited prejudices which divided the families of her parents. As a young girl wildly romping with the peasant children at Nohant she discovered a joy in untrammeled rural life which was only to increase with years. At the proper age for beginning to fashion a conventional young lady, the hoyden was put in a convent, where she underwent some exalting religious experiences; and in 1822 she was assigned to her place in the "established social order" by her marriage at seventeen to M. Dudevant. After a few years of rather humdrum domestic life in the country, she became aware that this gentleman, her husband, was behaving as we used to be taught that all French husbands ultimately behave; he was, in fact, turning from her to her maids. The young couple had never been strongly united—the impetuous dreamy girl and her coarse hunting mate; and they had grown wide apart. She should, of course, have adjusted herself quietly to the altered situation and have kept up appearances. But this young wife had gradually become an "intellectual"; she had been reading philosophy and poetry; she was saturated with the writings of Rousseau, of Chateaubriand, of Byron. None of the spiritual masters of her generation counselled acquiescence in servitude or silence in misery. Every eloquent tongue of the timespirit urged self-expression and revolt. And she, obedient to the deepest impulses of her blood and her time, revolted.

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 At the period when Madame Dudevant withdrew her neck from the conjugal yoke and plunged into her literary career in Paris, the doctrine that men are created for freedom, equality and fraternity was already somewhat hackneyed. She, with an impetus from her own private fortunes, was to give the doctrine a recrudescence of interest by resolutely applying it to the status of women. We cannot follow her in detail from the point where she abandons the domestic sewing-basket to reappear smoking black cigars in the Latin Quarter. We find her, at about 1831, entering into competition with the brilliant literary generation of Balzac, Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Mérimée, Stendhal, and Sainte-Beuve. To signalize her equality with her brothers in talent, she adopts male attire: "I had a sentry-box coat made, of rough grey cloth, with trousers and waistcoat to match. With a grey hat and a huge cravat of woolen material, I looked exactly like a first-year student." In the freedom of this rather unalluring garb, she entered into relations platonic, fraternal, or tempestuously passionate with perhaps the most distinguished series of friends and lovers that ever fluttered about one flame. There was Aurélien de Sèze; Jules Sandeau, her first collaborator, who "reconeiled her to life" and gave her a nom de guerre; the inscrutable Mérimée, who made no one happy; Musset—an encounter from which both tiger-moths escaped with singed wings; the odd transitional figure of Pagello; Michel Euraed; Liszt; Chopin, whom she loved

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 and nursed for eight years; her master Lamennais; her master Pierre Leroux; her father-confessor Sainte-Beuve; and Gustave Flaubert, the querulous friend of her last decade.

As we have compressed the long and complex story of her personal relationships, so we must compress the intimately related history of her works and her ideas. When under the inspiration of Rousseau, the emancipated George Sand began to write, her purposes were but vaguely defined. She conceived of life as primarily an opportunity for unlimited self-expansion, and of literature as an opportunity for unrestricted self-expression. "Nevertheless," she declares, "my instincts have formed, without my privity, the theory I am about to set down,—a theory which I have generally followed unconsciously. . . . According to this theory, the novel is as much a work of poetry as of analysis. It demands true situations, and characters not only true but real, grouped about a type intended to epitomize the sentiment or the main conceptions of the book. This type generally represents the passion of love since almost all novels are love stories. According to this theory (and it is here that it begins) the writer must idealize this love, and consequently this type,—and must not fear to attribute to it all the powers to which he inwardly aspires, or all the sorrows whose pangs he has observed or felt. This type must in no wise, however, become degraded by the vicissitude of events; it must either die or triumph."

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 In 1831, when her pen began its fluent course through the lyrical works of her first period—Indiana, Valentine, Lelia, Jacques, and the rest—we conceive George Sand's culture, temper, and point of view to have been fairly comparable with those of the young Shelley, when fifteen years earlier, he, with Mary Godwin, joined Byron and Jane Clairmont in Switzerland—young revoltés, all of them, nourished on eighteenth century revolutionary philosophy and Gothic novels. Both these eighteenth century currents meet in the work of the new romantic group in England and in France. The innermost origin of the early long poems of Shelley and the early works of George Sand is in personal passion, in the commotion of a romantic spirit beating its wings against the cage of custom and circumstance and institutions. The external form of the plot, whatever is fantastic and wilful in its setting and its adventures, is due to the school of Ann Radcliffe. But the quality in Shelley and in George Sand which bewitched even the austere Matthew Arnold, in his green and salad days, is the poetising of that liberative eighteenth century philosophy into "beautiful idealisms" of a love emancipated from human limitatiohs, a love exalted to the height of its gamut by the influences of nature, triumphantly seeking its own or shattered in magnificent despair. In her novels of the first period, George Sand takes her Byronic revenge upon M. Dudevant. In Indiana and its immediate successors, consciously or unconsciously, she declares to the

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 world what a beautiful soul M. Dudevant condemned to sewing on buttons; in Jacques she paints the man who might fitly have matched her spirit; and by the entire series, which now impresses us as fantastic in sentiment no less than in plot, she won her early reputation as the apologist for free love, the adversary of marriage.

In her middle period—say from 1838 to 1848—of which The Miller of Aginbault, Consuelo, and The Countess of Rudolstadt are representative works, there is a marked subsidence of her personal emotion, and, in compensation, a rising tide of humanitarian enthusiasm. Gradually satiated with erotic passion, gradually convinced that it is rather a mischief-maker than a reconstructive force in a decrepit society, she is groping, indeed, between her successive liaisons for an elusive felicity, for a larger mission than inspiring Musset's Alexandrines or Chopin's Nocturnes. It is somewhat amusing, and at the same time indicative of her vague but deep-seated moral yearnings, to find her writing rebukingly to Sainte-Beuve, as early as 1834, apropos of his epicurean Volupté: "Let the rest do as they like; but you, dear friend, you must produce a book which will change and better mankind, do you see? You can, and therefore should. Oh, if poor I could do it! I should lift my head again and my heart would no longer be broken; but in vain I seek a religion: Shall it be God, shall it be love, friendship, the public welfare? Alas, it seems to me that my soul is framed to receive all these impressions, with-

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 out one effacing another. . . . Who shall paint justice as it should, as it may, be in our modern society?"

To Sainte-Beuve, himself an unscathed intellectual Odysseus, she declares herself greatly indebted intellectually; but on the whole his influence seems to have been tranquillizing. The material for the radical program, economic, political, and religious, which, like a spiritual ancestor of H. G. Wells, she eagerly sought to popularize by the novels of her middle years, was supplied mainly by Saint-Simon, Lamennais, and Leroux. Her new "religion of humanity," a kind of theosophical socialism, is too fantastically garbed to charm the sober spirits of our age. And yet from the ruins of that time and from the emotional extravagance of books grown tedious, which she has left behind her, George Sand emerges for us with one radiant perception which must be included in whatever religion animates a democratic society: "Everyone must be happy, so that the happiness of a few may not be criminal and cursed by God."

One of George Sand's French critics, M. Caro, a member of the Academy, who deals austerely with her religious enthusiasms and with her Utopian projects for social reformation, remarks gravely and not without tenderness:

"The one thing needful to this soul, so strong, so rich in enthusiasm, is a humble moral quality that she disdains, and when she has occasion to speak of it, even slanders,—namely resignation. This is not,

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 as she seems to think, the sluggish virtue of base souls, who, in their superstitious servitude to force, hastens to crouch beneath every yoke. That is a false and degrading resignation; genuine resignation grows out of the conception of the universal order, weighed against which individual sufferings, without ceasing to be a ground of merit, cease to constitute a right of revolt. . . . Resignation, in the true, the philosophical, the Christian sense, is a manly acceptance of moral law and also of the laws essential to the social order; it is a free adherence to order, a sacrifice approved by reason of a part of one's private good and of one's personal freedom, not to might nor to the tyranny of a human caprice, but to the exigencies of the common weal, which subsists only by the concord of individual liberty with obedient passions."

Well, resigned in the sense of defeated, George Sand never became; nor did she, perhaps, ever wholly acquiesce in that scheme of things which M. Caro impressively designates as "the universal order." Yet with age, the abandonment of many distractions, the retreat to Nohant, the consolations of nature, and her occupation with tales of pastoral life, beginning with La Mare au Diable, there develops within her, there diffuses itself around her, there appears in her work a charm like that which falls upon green fields from the level rays of the evening sun after a day of storms. It is not the charm, precisely, of resignation; it is the charm of serenity—the serenity of an old revolutionist who no longer expects victory in the morning yet is still secure in her confidence of a final

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 triumph, and still more secure in the goodness of her cause. "A hundred times in life," she declares, "the good that one does seems to serve no immediate purpose; yet it maintains in one way and another the tradition of well wishing and well doing, without which all would perish." At the outset of her career we compared her with Shelley. In her last phase, she reminds us rather of the authors of Far from the Madding Crowd and The Mill on the Floss, and of Wordsworth, once, too, a torch of revolution, turning to his Michaels and his leech-gatherers and his Peter Bells. Her exquisite pictures of pastoral life are perhaps idealizations of it; her representations of the peasant are not corroborated by Zola's; to the last she approaches the shield of human nature from the golden side. But for herself at least she has found a real secret of happiness in country life, tranquil work, and a right direction given to her own heart and conscience.

It is at about this point in her spiritual development that she turns towards Gustave Flaubert—perhaps a little suspiciously at first, yet resolved from the first, according to her natural instincts and her now fixed principles, to stimulate by believing in his admirable qualities. Writing from Nohant in 1866 to him at Croisset, she epitomizes her distinction as a woman and as an author in this playful sally: "Sainte-Beuve, who loves you nevertheless, pretends that you are dreadfully vicious. But perhaps he sees with eyes a bit dirty, like that learned botanist who pretends that the germander is of

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 dirty yellow. The observation was so false that I could not help writing on the margin of his book:  ' It is you, whose eyes are dirty.

We have spoken of George Sand as a faithful daughter of the French Revolution; and by way of contrast we may speak of Flaubert as a disgruntled son of the Second Empire. Between his literary advent and hers there is an interval of a generation, during which the proud expansive spirit and the grandiose aspirations imparted to the nation by the first Napoleon dwindled to a spirit of mediocrity and bourgeois smugness under a Napoleon who had inherited nothing great of his predecessor but his name. This change in the timespirit may help to explain the most significant difference between Flaubert and George Sand. He inherited the tastes and imagination of the great romantic generation; but he inherited none of its social and political enthusiasm. He was disciplined by the romantic writers; yet his reaction to the literary culture of his youth is not ethical but æsthetic; he finds his inspiration less in Rousseau than in Chateaubriand. He is bred to an admiration of eloquence, the poetic phrase, the splendid picture, life in the grand style; with increasing disgust he finds himself entering a society which, he feels, neither understands nor values any of these things, and which threatens their destruction. Consequently, we find him actuated as a writer by two complementary passions: the love of splendor and the hatred of mediocrity—two passions, of which

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 the second sometimes alternates with the first, sometimes inseparably fuses with it, and ultimately almost extinguishes it.

The son of an eminent surgeon of Rouen, Gustave Flaubert may have acquired from his father something of that scientific precision of observation and that cutting accuracy of expression, by which he gained his place at the head of modern French realism and won the discipleship of the Goncourts, Daudet, Zola, and Maupassant and the applause of such connoisseurs of technique as Walter Pater and Henry James. From his mother's Norman ancestry he inherited the physique of a giant, tainted with epilepsy; a Viking countenance, strong-featured, with leonine moustaches; and a barbaric temper, habitually somewhat lethargic but irritable, and, when roused, violent and intolerant of opposition. He had a private education at Rouen, with wide, desultory reading; went to Paris, which he hated, to study law, which he also hated; frequented the theatres and studios; travelled in Corsica, the Pyrenees, and the East, which he adored, seeing Egypt, Palestine, Constantinople, and Greece; and he had one, and only one, important love-affair, extending from 1846 to 1854—that with Louise Colet, a woman of letters, whose difficult relations with Flaubert are sympathetically touched upon in Pater's celebrated essay on "Style." When by the death of his father, in 1854, he succeeded to the family-seat at Croisset, near Rouen, he settled him-

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