Sir,--There are many things that stand in the way of the critic when
he has a mind to praise the living. He may dread the charge of writing
rather to vex a rival than to exalt the subject of his applause. He
shuns the appearance of seeking the favour of the famous, and would not
willingly be regarded as one of the many parasites who now advertise
each movement and action of contemporary genius. 'Such and such men of
letters are passing their summer holidays in the Val d'Aosta,' or
the Mountains of the Moon, or the Suliman Range, as it may happen. So
reports our literary 'Court Circular,' and all our _Précieuses_ read the
tidings with enthusiasm. Lastly, if the critic be quite new to the world
of letters, he may superfluously fear to vex a poet or a novelist by the
abundance of his eulogy. No such doubts perplex us when, with all our
hearts, we would commend the departed; for they have passed almost
beyond the reach even of envy; and to those pale cheeks of theirs no
commendation can bring the red.
You, above all others, were and remain without a rival in your
many-sided excellence, and praise of you strikes at none of those who
have survived your day. The increase of time only mellows your renown,
and each year that passes and brings you no successor does but sharpen
the keenness of our sense of loss. In what other novelist, since
Scott was worn down by the burden of a forlorn endeavour, and died
for honour's sake, has the world found so many of the fairest gifts
combined? If we may not call you a poet (for the first of English
writers of light verse did not seek that crown), who that was less than
a poet ever saw life with a glance so keen as yours, so steady, and so
sane? Your pathos was never cheap, your laughter never forced; your
sigh was never the pulpit trick of the preacher. Your funny people--your
Costigans and Fokers--were not mere characters of trick and catch-word,
were not empty comic masks. Behind each the human heart was beating; and
ever and again we were allowed to see the features of the man.
Thus fiction in your hands was not simply a profession, like another,
but a constant reflection of the whole surface of life: a repeated echo
of its laughter and its complaint. Others have written, and not written
badly, with the stolid professional regularity of the clerk at his desk;
you, like the Scholar Gipsy, might have said that 'it needs heaven-sent
moments for this skill.' There are, it will not surprise you, some
honourable women and a few men who call you a cynic; who speak of 'the
withered world of Thackerayan satire;' who think your eyes were ever
turned to the sordid aspects of life--to the mother-in-law who threatens
to 'take away her silver bread-basket;' to the intriguer, the sneak, the
termagant; to the Beckys, and Barnes Newcomes, and Mrs. Mackenzies of
this world. The quarrel of these sentimentalists is really with life,
not with you; they might as wisely blame Monsieur Buffon because there
are snakes in his Natural History. Had you not impaled certain noxious
human insects, you would have better pleased Mr. Ruskin; had you
confined yourself to such performances, you would have been more dear to
the Neo-Balzacian school in fiction.
You are accused of never having drawn a good woman who was not a doll,
but the ladies that bring this charge seldom remind us either of Lady
Castlewood or of Theo or Hetty Lambert. The best women can pardon you
Becky Sharp and Blanche Amory; they find it harder to forgive you Emmy
Sedley and Helen Pendennis. Yet what man does not know in his heart that
the best women--God bless them--lean, in their characters, either to the
sweet passiveness of Emmy or to the sensitive and jealous affections
of Helen? 'Tis Heaven, not you, that made them so; and they are easily
pardoned, both for being a very little lower than the angels and for
their gentle ambition to be painted, as by Guido or Guercino, with wings
and harps and haloes. So ladies have occasionally seen their own
faces in the glass of fancy, and, thus inspired, have drawn Romola and
Consuelo. Yet when these fair idealists, Mdme. Sand and George Eliot,
designed Rosamund Vincy and Horace, was there not a spice of malice in
the portraits which we miss in your least favourable studies?
That the creator of Colonel Newcome and of Henry Esmond was a snarling
cynic; that he who designed Rachel Esmond could not draw a good woman:
these are the chief charges (all indifferent now to you, who were once
so sensitive) that your admirers have to contend against. A French
critic, M. Taine, also protests that you do preach too much. Did any
author but yourself so frequently break the thread (seldom a strong
thread) of his plot to converse with his reader and moralise his tale,
we also might be offended. But who that loves Montaigne and Pascal, who
that likes the wise trifling of the one and can bear with the melancholy
of the other, but prefers your preaching to another's playing!
Your thoughts come in, like the intervention of the Greek Chorus, as an
ornament and source of fresh delight. Like the songs of the Chorus, they
bid us pause a moment over the wider laws and actions of human fate and
human life, and we turn from your persons to yourself, and again from
yourself to your persons, as from the odes of Sophocles or Aristophanes
to the action of their characters on the stage. Nor, to my taste, does
the mere music and melancholy dignity of your style in these passages of
meditation fall far below the highest efforts of poetry. I remember
that scene where Clive, at Barnes Newcome's Lecture on the Poetry of the
Affections, sees Ethel who is lost to him. 'And the past and its dear
histories, and youth and its hopes and passions, and tones and looks for
ever echoing in the heart and present in the memory--these, no doubt,
poor Clive saw and heard as he looked across the great gulf of time, and
parting and grief, and beheld the wonmn he had loved for many years.'
_For ever echoing in the heart and present in the memory:_ who has not
heard these tones, who does not hear them as he turns over your books
that, for so many years, have been his companions and comforters? We
have been young and old, we have been sad and merry with you, we have
listened to the mid-night chimes with Pen and Warrington, have stood
with you beside the death-bed, have mourned at that yet more awful
funeral of lost love, and with you have prayed in the inmost chapel
sacred to our old and immortal affections, _a' léal souvenir!_ And
whenever you speak for yourself, and speak in earnest, how magical, how
rare, how lonely in our literature is the beauty of your sentences! 'I
can't express the charm of them' (so you write of George Sand; so we
may write of you): 'they seem to me like the sound of country bells,
provoking I don't know what vein of music and meditation, and falling
sweetly and sadly on the ear.' Surely that style, so fresh, so rich, so
full of surprises--that style which stamps as classical your fragments
of slang, and perpetually astonishes and delights--would alone give
immortality to an author, even had he little to say. But you, with your
whole wide world of fops and fools, of good women and brave men, of
honest absurdities and cheery adventurers: you who created the Steynes
and Newcomes, the Beckys and Blanches, Captain Costigan and F. B., and
the Chevalier Strong--all that host of friends imperishable--you must
survive with Shakespeare and Cervantes in the memory and affection of
men.