Letters to Dead Authors | Page 4

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 Pre'cieuses 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