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THE WIT AND HUMOUR OF LORD BEACONSFIELD.

DEATH is the gate of criticism: the grave is, by a strange law of natural compensation, essentially memorial. Once let it close over an eminent person, and the justice of perspective is restored: we remember much that we have forgotten; we forget much that we have remembered. More especially is this the case on the decease of an author whose life implies eloquence before a prejudiced or preoccupied audience. His words seem to return in a sequence, connecting and characterising his work, and the man revives in the manner. Above all, however, do these remarks concern Lord Beaconsfield. His individuality was so emphatic that impartial criticism has been hitherto impossible. On the one hand, there have been those who could not believe that a brilliant statesman might also be a great author, just as many argue from a woman's beauty against her ability; on the other, those who believed that rare literary promise had been blighted by rarer political success.

To estimate Lord Beaconsfield's position in the empire of letters is " a task far beyond our present space. We might have chosen the marvellous consistency of his sentiments, or the remarkable method of their development in his romances, or the invention by him (for such it is) of the political novel as our theme. But all these are not his most peculiar features, nor will they perpetuate him most. His wit and his humour are his style, and he himself has declared that it is on style that fiction most depends.

We ought first, however, to distinguish aright between wit and humour, for these terms indicate qualities and results by no means identical, and

have heard an acute thinker sum up the difference between them by terming wit a point, and humour a straight line; but this epigram is inadequate. Wit is no resumé of humour; the two qualities differ in kind. Wit is a department of style; it is the faculty of combining dissimilars, abstract and concrete alike, by the language of illustration, suggestion, and surprise. Like misery, it "yokes strange bed-fellows," but with the link of words alone. It is best when intellectually true, but its requisite is fancy.

Humour, on the other hand, is an exercise, by whatever means, of perception; it is the faculty of discerning the incongruities of the concrete alone, particularly of human nature; it "looks on this picture and on that; it is most excellent when ethically sound, but its essence is analysis!

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Wit works by comparison, humour by contrast. The sphere of wit is narrower than that of humour; the subject-matter of humour more limited than that of wit. We laugh at humour, at wit we smile. Talent is capable of the former; the perfection of the latter is reserved for genius. Wit is, as it were, Yorick, with cap and bells; but humour unmasks him with a moral. To define wit and humour one ought to be both humorous and witty, but we may epitomise by saying that wit is mirth turned philosopher-humour, philosophy at

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if we except the Celtic race, it is to the East that we must turn for proverb and simile. The "Haggadah" contains more absolute wit than even Aristophanes, the prince of humourists, sprung too as he was from an Asian civilisation. The wisdom of the

Koran is wittily formulated. Holy Writ itself contains many examples of wit, though none of humour; while the Moorish and Jewish schools of mediæval Spain furnish wit as subtle and supple as the flashing and fantastic arabesques of their Alhambra. If, we repeat, the Celts, who are both humorous and witty, be excepted, wit is of the Eastern, humour of the Western temperament, while the conjunction of both, the existence of what might be called Westorientalism, is extremely uncommon.

Almost the sole examples of wit pure and simple in post-Shakespearian times have been Voltaire, Molière, Rochefoucauld, Sheridan, and Heine: four were Celts, and the last a Hebrew, and in their company is to be enrolled Lord Beaconsfield. But Molière, Sheridan, and Heine were also humourists, and humourists again typically different. The humour of Molière and of Sheridan is, like that of Dickens or of Hogarth, direct and mainly didactic, pointing to the follies and foibles of mankind, the first chiefly by situation, the latter chiefly by speech; the humour of Heine, like that of Sterne, and often of Thackeray, indirect and inclined to the sentimental, insinuating with all the machinery of playful surprise the inconsistencies that enlist feeling or awaken thought. The former is the broadsword of Cœur de Lion, the latter the scimitar of Saladin. It is of this latter species that Lord Beaconsfield's finest humour must be reckoned.

Let us begin with an instance from Tancred. He is describing the Hebrew Feast of Tabernacles :

"Picture to yourself the child of Israel in the dingy suburb or the stolid quarter of some bleak northern town, where there is never a sun that can at any rate ripen grapes; yet he

must celebrate the vintage of purple Palestine. . . He rises in the morning; goes early to some Whitechapel market, purchases some willow-boughs for which he has previously given a commission, and which are brought probably from one of the neighbouring rivers of Essex, hastens home, cleans out the yard of his miserable tenements, builds his bower, decks it even profusely with the finest flowers and fruit he can procure, and hangs its roof with variegated lamps. After the service of his Synagogue he sups late with his wife and children in the open air as if he were in the pleasant villages of Galilee beneath its sweet and starry sky.

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Perhaps, as he is offering up the peculiar thanksgiving of the feast of Tabernacles, praising Jehovah for the vintage which his children may no longer cull, but also for his promise that they may some day again enjoy it, and his wife and his children_are joining in a pious Hosanna,' that is 'Save us,' a party of Anglo-Saxons, very respectable men, ten-pounders, a little elevated it may be, though certainly not in honour of the vintage, pass the house, and words like these are heard 'I say, Buggins, what's that row?' 'Oh! it's those cursed Jews! we're a lot of them. It is one of their horrible feasts. The Lord Mayor ought to interfere. However, things are not so bad as they used to be. They used always to crucify little boys at their hullabaloos, but now they only eat sausages made of panion, we all make progress." stinking pork.' To be sure,' replies his com

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We are at once reminded by this blended pathos and humour of the sudden transition at the close of Heine's "Moses Lump." Yet another example from the same Palestinic portion of the same book :

"Mr. Bernard is always with the English Bishop, who is delighted to have an addition to his congregation, which is not too much, consisting of his own family, the English and Prussian Consuls, and five Jews whom they have converted at twenty piastres a week, but I know they are going to strike for

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And once more Barizy of the Tower, a Jew, one of the life-like group of Jerusalem gossips, is made to say to Consul Pasqualizo—

"I don't think I can deal in crucifixes.' 'I tell you what, if you won't your cousin Barizy of the Gate will. I know he has given a great order to Bethlehem.' 'The traitor,' exclaimed Barizy of the Tower. 'Well, if people will purchase crucifixes, and nothing else, they must be supplied. Commerce civilises

man.

And indeed we shall find this same special vein of humour in his first novel alike and his last. Take this from Vivian Grey. The speaker is M. Sievers, the German statesman :—

"We have plenty of metaphysicians if you mean them. Watch that lively-looking gentleman who is stuffing Kalte Schale so voraciously in the corner. The leaven of the idealists, a pupil of the celebrated Fichte. the first principle of this school is to reject all expressions which incline in the slightest degree to substantiality. Existence is in his opinion a word too absolute. Being, principle, and essence, are terms scarcely sufficiently ethereal even to indicate the subtle shadowings of his opinions. Matter is his great enemy. My dear sir, observe how exquisitely Nature revenges herself on these capricious and fantastic children. Methinks that

the best answer to the idealism of M. Fichte is to see his pupil devouring Kalte Schale." And this from Endymion :

"The Chairman opened the proceedings, but was coldly received, though he spoke sensibly and at some length. He then introduced a gentleman who was absolutely an Alderman to move a resolution condemnatory of the Corn Laws. The august position of the speaker atoned for his halting rhetoric-and a city which had only just for the first time been invested with municipal privileges was hushed before a man who might in time even become a mayor.'

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corrected by the would-be interpreter, Keferinis :

"The English live in ships only during six months of the year, principally when they go to India, the rest entirely at their country houses."

Similar too is the oblique sarcasm of Fakredeen ::

"We ought never to be surprised at anything that is done by the English, who are after all in a certain sense savages. Everything they require is imported from other countries. I have been assured

at Beiroot that they do not grow even their own cotton-but that I can hardly believe. Even their religion is an exotic, and as they prising they should import their education are indebted for that to Syria, it is not surfrom Greece."

And this light thrust at London architecture :—

"Shall we find a refuge in a committee of taste, escape from the mediocrity of one to the mediocrity of many? But one sugges

tion might be made. No profession in England has done its best until it has furnished its victim. The pure administration of justice dates from the deposition of Macclesfield. Even our boasted navy never achieved a victory until we shot an admiral. Suppose an architect were hanged!" 1

Or finally, not to embarrass with riches, in the philosophy of Hot Plates, where the reason of cold dinners in Paris is ascribed to the inferiority of French pottery, and the author concludes quite in the manner of Sterne :

"Now if we only had that treaty of commerce with France which has been so often on the point of completion, the fabrics of our unrivalled potteries in exchange for their

Or, again, Lord Monmouth's indignant capital wines would be found throughout advice to Coningsby :—

"You go with your family, sir, like a gentleman. You are not to consider your opinions like a philosopher or a political adventurer."

Or Waldershare's account of England's ascendency :

"I must say it was a grand idea of our kings making themselves sovereigns of the

sea.

The greater portion of this planet is water, so we at once become a first-rate power."

Or the Homeric simplicity of the Ansary tribe, who believe London to be surrounded by sea, and ask if the

France. The dinners of both nations would be improved; the English would gain a delightful beverage, and the French for the first time in their lives would dine off hot plates, an unanswerable instance of the advantages of commercial reciprocity."

But it is not this note alone, though to our minds this note is best, that Lord Beaconsfield strikes in the scale of humour. He has rung almost all the changes it contains, from the broadest comedy to the finest irony. He has revelled in burlesque, and has yet developed characters whose humour is at once lifelike and astonishing.

Thackeray himself, in his Mirobolant love-making by the dishes he has cooked, has not surpassed the mock gravity of the chef's conference with which Tancred opens. The scene is laid in

"that part of the celebrated parish of St. George, which is bounded on one side by Piccadilly, and on the other by Curzon Street

It is in this district that the cooks have ever sought an elegant abode. An air of stillness and serenity, of exhausted passion and suppressed emotion, rather than of sluggishness or dulness, distinguishes this quarter during the day."

It is in such august surroundings that "Papa Prevost," the veteran chef, advises young Leander, his favourite pupil ("the chef of the age"), on his choice of an aide-decamp in the approaching campaign of Tancred's coming-of-age banquet :

"What you have learned from me came at least from a good school. It is something to have served under Napoleon,' added Prevost, with the grand air of the imperial kitchen. 'Had it not been for Waterloo I should have had the cross, but the Bourbons and the cooks of the Empire never could understand each other. They brought over an emigrant chef who did not comprehend the taste of the age. He wished to bring everything back to the time of the oil de bœuf; when Monsieur passed my soup of Austerlitz untasted, I knew the old family was doomed; but we gossip. . . . There is Andrieu . . . you had some hopes of him. He is too young. took him to Hellingsley, and he lost his head on the third day. I intrusted the soufflées to him, and but for the most desperate personal exertions all would have been lost. It was an affair of the Bridge of Arcola,'

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666 Ah, mon Dieu, there are moments !' exclaimed Prevost."

Equally too of the Thackerayan flavour is the account of Freeman and Trueman, the flunkeys attendant on Tancred in Palestine, who call an Emir The Hameer. The former comments on a Syrian castle :—

"There must have been a fine coming of age here,' rejoined Trueman.

"As for that,' replied Freeman, 'comings of age depend in a manner upon meat and drink. They ain't in no way to be carried out with coffee and pipes; without oxen roasted whole and broached hogsheads they ain't in a manner legal.'".

And again while near the Lebanon.

"I know what you are thinking of, John,' replied Mr. F. in a serious tone. You are thinking if anything were to happen to either of us in this heathen land we should get Christian burial.'

"Lord love you, Mr. Freeman, no I wasn't. I was thinking of a glass of ale.'

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'Ah!' sighed Freeman, it softens the heart to think of such things away from home as we are. Do you know, John, there are times when I feel very queer, there are indeed. I catched myself a-singing "Sweet Home" one night among those savages in the wilderness. One wants consolation sometimes, one does, indeed, and for my part I do miss the family prayers and the home-brewed."

The Thackerayan irony is once more apparent in the picture of the sponging house where Ferdinand Armine finds himself immured:

"There were also indications of literary amusement in the room in the shape of a Hebrew Bible and the Racing Calendar;"

and in the money-lender's advice for diminishing the loan required:

"Fifteen hundred pound,' ejaculated Mr. Levison. Well, I suppose we must make it 7007. scmehow or other, and you must take the rest in coals;'"1

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in Mrs. Guy Flouncey, "sure of an
ally directly the gentlemen appeared,"
(a Becky Sharp in miniature) as she
cries in triumph after the aristocratic
ball for which she has strenuously
pined, "We have done 'it at last, my
love."3
And in the radical manufac-
turer's confession of political faith,
"I don't like extremes. A wise minister
should take the duty off cotton wool."

But the broader humour, that of Fielding and Dickens, is also forcibly represented in Lord Beaconsfield's pages. Perhaps few of our readers remember the Squire in Venetia―surely a country cousin of the little Judge in Pickwick-when Morgana, the suspected gipsy, is brought up for trial before him.

"Trust me to deal with these fellows. The hint of petty treason staggered him. The court must be cleared. Constable,

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per annum for all under six years of age, and a few extras only for fencing, pure milk, and the guitar."

And (to terminate this section of our illustrations) the celebrated Dartford election from Coningsby, the rival of that at Eatanswill in Pickwick. Its nomination day, "lounging without an object, and luncheon without an appetite," Magog Wrath and Bully Bluck with their rival war-cries, and above all Rigby's speech :

"Some nights there was music on the stage. A young lady in a white robe with a golden harp, and attended by a gentleman in black mustachios. This was when the principal harpist of the king of Saxony and his first fiddle happened to be passing through Mowbray merely by accident on a tour of pleasure and instruction to witness the famous scenes of British industry. Otherwise the audience of the 'Cat and Fiddle 'we beg pardon, we mean the Temple of the Muses' were fain to be content with four Bohemian Brothers, or an equal number of Swiss Sisters."

appetite,' white robe with

Or Mr. Fitzloom, the

Manchester

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"Mr. Smith, the fashionable novelist, that is to say a person who occasionally publishes three volumes, one half of which contains the adventures of a young gentleman in the country, and the other volume and a half the adventures of the same young gentleman in the metropolis." 2

In the same strain too is Lord
Cadurcis' prejudice against Pontius
Pilate-

"From seeing him when I was a child on an old Dutch tile fireplace at Marringhurst, dressed like a Burgomaster.' "3.

And the school in Vivian Grey kept

"By sixteen young ladies, all the daughters of clergymen, merely to attend to the morals and the linen; terms moderate, 100 guineas

"He brought in his crack theme, the guillotine, and dilated so elaborately upon its qualities, that one of the gentlemen below could not refrain from exclaiming, I wish you may get it.' This exclamation gave Mr. Rigby what is called a 'great opening, which, like a practised speaker, he immediately seized. He denounced the sentiment as un-English, and got very much cheered. Excited by this success, Rigby began to call everything else with which he did not agree un-English, until menacing murmurs began to arise, when he shifted the subject and rose into a grand peroration, in which he assured them that the eyes of the whole empire were on this particular election (cries of 'That's true' on all sides), and that England expected every man to do his duty. And who do you expect to do yours,' inquired a gentleman below, about that 'ere pension?""

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We must still, before we can consider our author's wit, treat, and of necessity briefly, his burlesque humour and his humorous development of character. The former is rifest, as is natural, in his earliest works, and overflowing with high spirits, though never of an impersonal nature. Their constant reference to politics and society allies them more nearly to Gulliver's Travels than to the Rose and the Ring, though the whimsical Beckendorff and the episode in Vivian Grey of the Rhine wine dukes is an exception to this rule. Let us commence with the

earliest :

"I protest,' said the King of Thessaly, 'against this violation of the most sacred rights.'

"The marriage tie?' said Mercury. "The dinner hour?' said Jove. "It is no use talking sentiment to Ixion,' said Venus, mortals are callous.'

"Adventures are to the adventurous,' said Minerva." 4

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