fensive. The audacity with which a lad of twenty solves
all the problems of the universe, excites in Disraeli genuine and really
generous sympathy. Sidonia converts the sentiment into a theory.
Experience, he says, is less than nothing to a creative mind. 'Almost
everything that is great has been done by youth.' The greatest captains,
the greatest poets, artists, statesmen, and religious reformers of the
world, have done their best work by middle life. All theories upon all
subjects can be proved from history; and the great Sidonia is not to be
pinned down by too literal an interpretation. But at least he is
expressing Disraeli's admiration for intellect which has the fervour,
rapidity, and reckless audacity of youth, which trusts its intuitions
instead of its calculations, and takes its crudest guesses for flashes
of inspiration. The exuberant buoyancy of his youthful heroes gives a
certain contagious charm to Disraeli's pages, which is attractive even
when verging upon extravagance. Our popular novelists have learned to
associate high spirits with muscularity; their youthful heroes are
either athletes destined to put on flesh in later days, or premature
prigs with serious convictions and a tendency to sermons and blue-books.
After a course of such books, Disraeli's genuine love of talent is
refreshing. He dwells fondly upon the effervescence of genius which
drives men to kick over the traces of respectability and strike out
short cuts to fame. If at bottom his heroes are rather eccentric than
original, they have at least a righteous hatred of all bores and
Philistines, and despise orthodoxy, political economy, and sound
information generally. They can provide you with new theories of
politics and history, as easily as Mercutio could pour out a string of
similes; and we have scarcely the heart to ask whether this vivacious
ebullition implies the process of fermentation by which a powerful mind
clears its crude ideas, or only an imitation of the process by which
superlative cleverness apes true genius. Intellect, as it becomes
sobered by middle age and by scholastic training, is no longer so
charming. When its guesses ossify into fixed opinions, and its arrogance
takes the airs of scientific dogmatism, it is always a tiresome and may
be a dangerous quality. Some indication of what Disraeli means by
intellect may be found in the preface to 'Lothair.' Speaking of the
conflict between science and the old religions, he says t