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- 11375
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T03:55:03.883Z
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- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 11312
- text
- the reason that any appellative at all savouring of arbitrary rank is
unsuitable to a man of liberal and catholic mind.
In defence of their insistent employment of the title, a caprice hardly
compatible with their political principles, the Levellers of his
acquaintance, candid in inconsistency, freely admit that somehow there
is something in it felicitously befitting the character innately noble
of de Grandvin.
But some fuller account of this genial paragon, upon whom are concentred
the otherwise diverging suffrages of the divers parties in Church and
State--some account less restricted by considerations of space--is in
course of preparation, and if clamorously demanded, may hereafter
appear. For the present purpose it will be enough, perhaps, if an
outlined picture or two serve to suggest the filled portrait.
Though not so plentiful as our peaches in a good year, there are men of
such noble quality that being in their company enriches and mellows one.
The wisdom they by contact give out is not celibate and sterile like
Solomon’s, but wedded to enjoyment, and hence productive. They would
seem to be a confirmation of the otherwise disputable maxim of Spinoza,
that every advance in joy implies an ascent in the scale of intelligence
and capability. The influence of such a man insensibly disposes one to
gentle charities, brave conceptions, heroic virtues. They have a
suggestion of the potentialities in the unvitiated Adam, a creature,
according to hallowed authority, originally created but a little lower
than the angels. Almost invariably these men have physical beauty; and
the moral charm is in keeping with that, apparently a spontaneous
emanation from it. It is as golden wine down in a golden chalice, where,
seen through the lustre suffusing the shadow, the delicious fluid looks
to be the exuded gathered sap of the precious metal.
It was of the Marquis de Grandvin that the landscape painter, B. Hobbema
Brown, an inoffensive sort of theoretical misanthrope, with a
treacherous flow of loving-kindness in him--to borrow one of his own
eccentric phrases; the same B. Hobbema who, were his significant
reticence on the point, no unwise thing in him, by the way,
conjecturally rendered into words, would seem in his own private
judgment to have been treated illiberally enough by the art-dealers,
art-critics, and academic hanging-committees, to say nothing of the art
public; well, it was of some other than the Marquis that Hobbema B.,
returning in moonlight from a choice assemblage, where he had been
introduced to him, and undergone the inevitable fascination of the
contact; it was of him that Brown enthusiastically exclaimed to his
companion: ‘What a godsend to meet such a man! He is a set-off against
the battalions of his contraries. Between you and me, mankind taken in a
lump are the gods’ job-lot; but, by heaven, the race that can produce a
Marquis de Grandvin is not promiscuously to be contemned!’
See there how the talismanic something in the sort of nature here
indicated can operate upon another nature though of a temper not
favourably disposed to receive its benign influence.
In the casual outcome of such a character, gay fancies and suggestions
without stint, sallies of wit and bonhomie, all sharing more or less in
a certain lyric glow; herein the spiritual bounty to us would seem to be
an unconsciousness in the almoner, involving, too, an indifference or
unconcern as to who may appropriate, or as to what purpose the
appropriation may be applied. In this particular, what recks the Marquis
de Grandvin, for example? He is the ripe peach-tree shedding its
abundance, careless of the garner; he is the Prince of Golconda at the
ball, some of whose innumerable diamond buttons drop from his raiment
unheeded by him in the chance fleeting rubs and collisions of the dance.
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- Chunk 12