Genius is both light and heat; it combines enthusiasm with insight. Such a genius was Disraeli. He was eminently a man of ideas, and not merely of abnormal perceptions. This distinction again is material, and too often ignored. The eminently perceptive man is at root a critic, while the man of ideas is by prerogative a creator; and yet the quick perceiver is often mistaken for a creative genius, and keenness confused with originality. In politics, for instance, this was the case with such different beings as Peel and Gambetta; in literature, with Addison and Arnold; in art, with Kneller and Lawrence. Disraeli’s ideas were at once his creations and companions, and he moved in their inner circle with a sort of extravagant intensity. They were no shadows. He was convinced of their substance almost to fatalism, and his immense will-power forced and projected them into movement. In his extreme youth, before his character had matured, these ideas flickered as fantasies. The restlessness of a volition felt, but not yet freed or directed, caused some masquerade of guise, and a perpetual strain on the intuition that sought to forestall experience. Realisation alone, with power and experience, brought repose. But at all periods an idea that had once seized him tinged his whole being. Its reality haunted him till he had given it place and shape.[7] An inward and ideal energy possessed him. Ideas were for him far more tangible, even far more sociable, than the outward and fleeting phantasms around him, as is evidenced in his fiction by his constant habit of transferring environment and transplanting personalities to accentuate their ideal essence. Thus, in _Venetia_, the soul of Lady Byron animates the form of Shelley’s wife, while the very date is put back some thirty years, that Shelley himself might be enabled to have braved in action what he mused in poetry. So, again, in _Contarini_, the hero’s development blends something of his own with something of his father’s character; while Baron Fleming is his grandfather reincarnated as a noble.[8] About the ironies of these, the arabesques of his playful fancy flickered. For him they were mostly the pretexts of things, but ideas were the causes, and he loved to contrast “the pretext with the cause;” but even here romance blent with irony, and invested the seemingly trivial with wonder. Some, too, of his ideas hovered, as it were, over the present scene, in a flight bound other-whither and beyond. In a word, Disraeli was an artist, conscious and confident of an over-mastering call. As he has written in a striking passage from the work of his youth, _Contarini Fleming_: “I never labour to delude myself; and never gloss over my own faults. I exaggerate them; for I can afford to face truth, because I feel capable of improvement.... I am never satisfied.... The very exercise of power teaches me that it may be wielded for a greater purpose.... No one