I. to W. M. Thackeray - Page 2

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.