Letters to Dead Authors | Page 5

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.'
Foreverechoingintheheartandpresentinthememory: 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'le'alsouvenir! 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.

II.
To Charles Dickens.

Sir,--It has been said that every man is born a Platonist or an
Aristotelian, though the enormous majority of us, to be sure, live and
die without being conscious of any invidious philosophic partiality
whatever. With more truth (though that does not imply very much)

every Englishman who reads may be said to be a partisan of yourself or
of Mr. Thackeray. Why should there be any partisanship in the matter;
and why, having two such good things as your novels and those of your
contemporary, should we not be silently happy in the possession? Well,
men are made so, and must needs fight and argue over their tastes in
enjoyment. For myself, I may say that in this matter I am what the
Americans do not call a 'Mugwump,' what English politicians dub a
'superior person'--that is, I take no side, and attempt to enjoy the best of
both.
It must be owned that this attitude is sometimes made a little difficult
by the vigour of your special devotees. They have ceased, indeed, thank
Heaven! to imitate you; and even in 'descriptive articles' the touch of
Mr. Gigadibs, of him whom 'we almost took for the true Dickens,' has
disappeared. The young lions of the Press no longer mimic your less
admirable mannerisms--do not strain so much after fantastic
comparisons, do not (in your manner and Mr. Carlyle's) give people
nick-names derived from their teeth, or their complexion; and,
generally, we are spared second-hand copies of all that in your style
was least to be commended. But, though improved by lapse of time in
this respect, your devotees still put on little conscious airs of virtue,
robust manliness, and so forth, which would have irritated you very
much, and there survive some press men who seem to have read