rse of Byronism, and rarely woos your
sympathy, shuns the statuesque pathetic, or any kind of posturing. For
Beauchamp will not even look at happiness to mourn its absence; melodious
lamentations, demoniacal scorn, are quite alien to him. His faith is in
working and fighting. With every inducement to offer himself for a
romantic figure, he despises the pomades and curling-irons of modern
romance, its shears and its labels: in fine, every one of those positive
things by whose aid, and by some adroit flourishing of them, the nimbus
known as a mysterious halo is produced about a gentleman's head. And a
highly alluring adornment it is! We are all given to lose our solidity
and fly at it; although the faithful mirror of fiction has been showing
us latterly that a too superhuman beauty has disturbed popular belief in
the bare beginnings of the existence of heroes: but this, very likely, is
nothing more than a fit of Republicanism in the nursery, and a deposition
of the leading doll for lack of variety in him. That conqueror of
circumstances will, the dullest soul may begin predicting, return on his
cockhorse to favour and authority. Meantime the exhibition of a hero whom
circumstances overcome, and who does not weep or ask you for a tear, who
continually forfeits attractiveness by declining to better his own
fortunes, must run the chances of a novelty during the interregnum.
Nursery Legitimists will be against him to a man; Republicans likewise,
after a queer sniff at his pretensions, it is to be feared. For me, I
have so little command over him, that in spite of my nursery tastes, he
drags me whither he lists. It is artless art and monstrous innovation to
present so wilful a figure, but were I to create a striking fable for
him, and set him off with scenic effects and contrasts, it would be only
a momentary tonic to you, to him instant death. He could not live in such
an atmosphere. The simple truth has to be told: how he loved his country,
and for another and a broader love, growing out of his first passion,
fought it; and being small by comparison, and finding no giant of the
Philistines disposed to receive a stone in his fore-skull, pummelled the
obmutescent mass, to the confusion of a conceivable epic. His indifferent
England refused it to him. That is all I can say. The greater power of
the two, she seems, with a quiet derision that does not belie her amiable
passivity, to have reduced in Beauchamp's career the boldest rea