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 readiness for public action,
and some good stout efforts besides, to the flat result of an optically
discernibl