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 woman 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,e leal 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 Idon'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.
