ruler of genuine Liberal and even democratic proclivities, which the timid calculations of a second-rate opportunist reduced to a contemptible travesty of Liberalism.  The shifting standpoints of such a man are reproduced with superfluous fidelity in his supposed Defence, which seems designed to be as elusive and impalpable as the character it reflects.  How unlike the brilliant and precise realism of Blougram, sixteen years before!  The upcurling cloud-rings from Hohenstiel’s cigar seem to symbolise something unsubstantial and evasive in the whole fabric.  The assumptions we are invited to form give way one after another.  Leicester Square proves the “Residenz,” the “bud-mouthed arbitress” a shadowy memory, the discourse to a friendly and flattered hearer a midnight meditation.  And there is a like fluctuation of mood.  Now he is formally justifying his past, now musing, half wistfully, half ironically, over all that he might have been and was not.  At the outset we see him complacently enough intrenched within a strong position, that of the consistent opportunist, who made the best of what he found, not a creator but a conservator, “one who keeps the world safe.”  But he has ardent ideas and aspirations.  The freedom of Italy has kindled his imagination, and in the grandest passage of the poem he broods over his frustrate but deathless dream:—­

     “Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught,
      Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine
      For ever!  Crumbled arch, crushed aqueduct,
      Alive with tremors in the shaggy growth
      Of wild-wood, crevice-sown, that triumphs there,
      Imparting exultation to the hills.”

[Footnote 57:  Letters of E.B.B., ii. 385.]

But if he had abandoned these generous dreams, he had won free trade and given the multitude cheap bread, and in a highly ingenious piece of sophistry he explains, by the aid of the gospel of Evolution, how men are united by their common hunger, and thrust apart by their conflicting ideas.  But Hohenstiel knows very well that his intrenchments are not unassailable; and he goes on to compose an imaginary biography of himself as he might have been, with comments which reflect his actual course.  The finest part of this aethereal voyage is that in which his higher unfulfilled self pours scorn upon the paltry duplicities of the “Peace” policy by which his actual and lower self had kept on good terms abroad, and beguiled the imperious thirst for “la gloire” at home.  Indignantly the author of Herve Riel asks why “the more than all magnetic race” should have to court its rivals by buying their goods untaxed, or guard against them by war for war’s sake, when Mother Earth has no pride above her pride in that same

                    “race all flame and air
      And aspiration to the boundless Great,
      The incommensurably Beautiful—­
      Whose very falterings groundward come of flight
      Urged by a pinion all too passionate
      For heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow.”