ors more; a man honest
and of statesmanlike mind, who lent himself to the basest services of
party politics for purely selfish ends; a poet whose predominant faculty
was that of disidealizing; a master of vernacular style, in whose works
an Irish editor finds hundreds of faults of English to correct;
strangest of all, a middle-aged clergyman of brutal coarseness, who
could inspire two young, beautiful, and clever women, the one with a
fruitless passion that broke her heart, the other with a love that
survived hope and faith to suck away the very sources of that life
whereof it was the only pride and consolation. No wonder that a new life
of so problematic a personage as this should be awaited with eagerness,
the more that it was to be illustrated with much hitherto unpublished
material and was to be written by the practised hand of Mr. Forster.
Inconsistency of conduct, of professed opinion, whether of things or
men, we can understand; but an inconsistent character is something
without example, and which nature abhors as she does false logic.
Opportunity may develop, hindrance may dwarf, the prevailing set of
temptation may give a bent to character, but the germ planted at birth
can never be wholly disnatured by circumstance any more than soil or
exposure can change an oak into a pine. Character is continuous, it is
cumulative, whether for good or ill; the general tenor of the life is a
logical sequence from it, and a man can always explain himself to
himself, if not to others, as a coherent whole, because he always knows,
or thinks he knows, the value of _x_ in the personal equation. Were it
otherwise, that sense of conscious identity which alone makes life a
serious thing and immortality a rational hope, would be impossible. It
is with the means of finding out this unknown quantity--in other words,
of penetrating to the man's motives or his understanding of them--that
the biographer undertakes to supply us, and unless he succeed in this,
his rummaging of old papers but raises a new cloud of dust to darken our
insight.

[Footnote 1: Lowell was mistaken. Heine never lost his love for the
Jews. He regretted his apostasy and always regarded himself as a Jew,
and not a Christian. His own genius was Hebraic, and not, as Matthew
Arnold thought, Hellenic. It should be incidentally stated that Lowell
had great admiration for the Jews. The late Dr. Weir Mitchell once told
me that Lowell regretted that he was not a Jew and even