I. to W. M. Thackeray

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
_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