THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL
675
the company of gentlemen. To Stephen the German philosophers
were fair game: Hegel was "in many things, little better than an
ass"; as for Schlegel, Stephen refused to believe that Coleridge could
have stolen his Shakespeare criticism from Schlegel " partly at least,
from the reason which would induce me to acquit a supposed thief
of having stolen a pair of breeches from a wild Highlandman."
For the most part, the tone was mild and agreeable. It was as
if
the essayist had entered into a compact of friendship with his sub–
ject, so that Morley could be equally tender toward Rousseau and
Burke (as
if
these two were not implacable enemies ) , or Stephen
toward almost all of the great writers of the eighteenth and nine–
teenth centuries.
This
equanimity and good nature characterizes
all
of Stephen's literary work. He was a biographer who did not believe
in revealing all that an inquisitive reader might like to know, and a
critic who praised the Life of Kingsley for its reticence. He was widely
read in the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but
he managed, as English reviewers say in praise, to carry his learning
lightly. He was thoughtful yet never argumentative, sensitive but not
precious, sympathetic without being committed. He had all the virtues
of the gentleman-amiability, broad-mindedness and a high tolerance
-which meant that he had the great vice of the essayist-literary
promiscuity.
Stephen's essay on Jonathan Edwards is instructive. Here was a
man who was as unlikely a candidate for his sympathy as is con–
ceivable-a religious zealot, mystic, witch-hunter, and hair-splitting
theologian. Yet Stephen never lost his temper: Edwards "is morbid,
it may be, but he is not insincere"; "there is something rather touch–
ing, though at times our sympathy is not quite unequivocal. . ."
Stephen was able to be good-tempered because he never really be–
lieved that a man could honestly believe in sin and hell-fire as Ed–
wards professed to. Himself a gentleman, he was generous enough to
ignore these distressing lapses of taste and to assume that Edwards
too was at heart a gentleman. So casually and smoothly that the
reader is almost lulled into acquiescence, Stephen comes out with his
remarkable conclusion: "That Edwards possessed extraordinary
acuteness
is
as clear as it is singular that so acute a man should have
suffered his intellectual activity to be restrained within such narrow
fetters. Placed in a different medium, under the same circumstances,
