, for the homely features
which (if we could but admit it) so infinitely better match the honest
stories. Let us not busy ourselves to make excuse for our austere little
genius of the moors. Let us be content to take her exactly as she was,
with her rebellion and her narrowness, her angers and her urgencies,
perceiving that she had to be this sorrowful offspring of a poisoned
world in order to clear the wells of feeling for others, and to win from
emancipated generations of free souls the gratitude which is due to a
precursor.

[Footnote 7: Address delivered before the Bronte Society in the Town
Hall of Dewsbury, March 28th, 1903.]

THE NOVELS OF BENJAMIN DISRAELI

It is not easy for a man whose sovereign ambition is seen to be leading
him with great success in a particular direction to obtain due credit
for what he accomplishes with less manifest success in another. There is
no doubt that Disraeli as an author has, at all events until very
lately, suffered from the splendour of his fame as a politician. But he
was an author long before he became a statesman, and it certainly is a
little curious that even in his youth, although he was always
commercially successful with his books, they were never, as we say,
"taken seriously" by the critics. His earliest novels were largely
bought, and produced a wide sensation, but they were barely accepted as
contributions to literature. If we look back to the current criticism of
those times, we find such a book as _Dacre_, a romance by the Countess
of Morley, which is now absolutely forgotten, treated with a dignity and
a consideration never accorded to _The Young Duke_ or to _Henrietta
Temple_. Even Disraeli's satiric squibs, in the manner of Lucian and
Swift, which seem to us among the most durable ornaments of light
literature in the days of William IV., were read and were laughed at,
but were not critically appraised.

So, too, at the middle period of Disraeli's literary life, such books as
_Coningsby_ and _Tancred_ were looked upon as amusing commentaries on
the progress of a strenuous politician, not by any means, or by any
responsible person, as possible minor classics of our language. And at
his third period, the ruling criticism of the hour was aghast at faults
which now entertain us, and was blind to sterling merits which we are
now ready to acknowledge. Shortly after his death, perhaps his most
brilliant apologist was fain to admit that if Disraeli had been
u