of modern conventions, and has fewer calls for the exercise of small contempts. The main characters, Esmond, his Mistress, and Beatrix, are the ablest he has drawn; they are not less vivid than his others, and more complete. Esmond is strong, vigorous, noble, finely executed as well as conceived, and his weakness springs from the strength of a generous and impulsive nature. He is no exception to the observation that Mr. Thackeray never endows a hero with principles of action. Esmond is true to persons, not to ideas of right or duty. His virtue is fidelity, not conscientiousness. Beatrix is perhaps the finest picture of splendid, lustrous, physical beauty ever given to the world. It shines down every woman that poet or painter ever drew. Helen of Greece,

"Fairer than the evening air

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,"

is the only one who approaches her. And both her character and that of her mother are masterpieces of poetical insight; the latter blemished, however, here and there with the author's unconquerable hankering to lay his finger on a blot. He must search it out, and give it at least its due blackness. He will not leave you to gather that it must be there,—he parades it to the day, and presses it to your reluctant eyes. It comes partly from the truthfulness of his nature, which cannot bear that a weakness should be concealed, and partly probably from a mistaken apprehension of the truth that the artist must be true to nature. There was a time when a good deal of parade was made and some very diluted philosophy spun out of the distinction between "the true" and "the real." But this simple fact there is, that a man may be true to nature and yet depart from all her manifested forms; and that it is a higher striving to be faithful to such an inborn conception than to mutilate and distort it for the sake of finding room in it for certain observed facts. Mr. Thackeray sometimes does

this, oftener he does what is quite as unpleasing. When in a character, especially a woman's, he comes upon a defect, he does not allow it to speak itself, or show itself naturally, and sink with its own proper significance into the reader's mind. He rushes in as author, seizes on it, and holds it up with sadness or triumph: "See," he says, "this is what you find in the best women." he gives it an undue importance and vividness, and troubles and distorts the true impression of the whole character.

Thus

In the same spirit he lays hold of the petty dishonesties and shams of social life. Almost all these have their origin in vanity, and in its hasty and habitual gratification the meanness of the devices is overlooked, at any rate not often wilfully adopted with a consciousness of its presence. Such contrivances are follies of a bad kind; but to stigmatise them as deliberate hypocrisies is to give a very false significance to the worst ingredient in them.

In the Newcomes "the elements are kindlier mixed" than in any of the other fictions; there is a great softening of tone; a larger predominance is given to feeling over sarcasm. As before, the book is a transcript from life; but the life is more pleasantly selected, and the baser ingredients not scattered with so lavish a hand. If the execution be somewhat inferior, as perhaps it is, the characters of Clive and Ethel less clearly and vividly defined than we have by long use to high excellence begun to think we have a right to expect they should be, and the former unattractive in his feebleness; if the journey through the story be rather langweilig, sometimes from over-detail, sometimes from long and superficial moralisings over the sins of society, yet there is much to reconcile us to these shortcomings in exchange, in some greater respite from the accustomed sneer. have said before that the genius of Thackeray has many analogies to that of Goethe. He is like him, not only in

We

his mode of depicting characters as they live, instead of reproducing their depths and entirety from the conception of a penetrative imagination, but also in his patient and tolerant acceptance of all existing phenomena, and his shrinking not merely from moral judgment but from moral estimate. The avoidance of the former springs in Thackeray from kindly feeling, from the just and humble sense we all should have that our own demerits make it unseemly for us to ascend the judgment-chair, and from a wide appreciation of the variety and obscurity of men's real motives of action; the latter, a very different thing, springs from this same wide insight, which makes the task more than ordinarily difficult, -especially to an intellect not framed to take pleasure in general conclusions,—and from his imagination being one which does not naturally conceive in separate wholes, and most of all from an insufficient sense of the duty incumbent on us all to form determinate estimates of the characters and moral incidents around us, if only to form the landmarks and bearings for our own conduct in life. These features remain in the Newcomes. There is the same want of ballasting thought, the same see-saw between cynicism and sentiment, the same suspension of moral judgment. The indignant impulse prompts the lash, and the hand at once delivers it, while the mind hangs back, doubts its justice, and sums up after execution with an appeal to our charity on the score of the undecipherable motives of human action, the heart's universal power of self-deception, and the urgency of fate and circumstance.

309

THE MISS BRONTËS.*

[July 1857.]

It is

FRIENDS and friendly biographers are apt to ask too much from "the public," and from the critic who expresses an individual atom of public judgment. There is such a thing as being unjust to the judges. unjust to require of readers-all of whom more or less form opinions on an author-that the personal qualities of the writer, unblemished purity of life, exalted heroism, or heroic self-denial, should blind them to errors of style or dullness of story. It is constantly urged, more or less directly, that Smith must write sense because he supports an aged mother, and Amelia be true to nature because all her friends love her so much; and when these claims are ignored, there is irritation and outcry.

"It

is well," Mrs. Gaskell writes, "that the thoughtless critics, who spoke of the sad and gloomy views of life presented by the Brontës in their tales, should know how such words were wrung out of them by the living recollection of the

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66

*The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Author of "Jane Eyre," Shirley,' "Villette," &c. By E. C. Gaskell, Author of Mary Barton," "Ruth," &c. 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1857.

Miss Brontë's Novels. London: same Publishers.

Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey. By Ellis and Acton Bell. A new edition, revised; with a Biographical Notice of the Authors, a Selection from their Literary Remains, and a Preface. By Currer Bell. London: same Publishers, 1851. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. By Acton Bell. Hodgson. Poems. By Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Smith, Elder, and Co., 1846.

London:

long agony they suffered." Why thoughtless critics? They had penetration enough, it seems, to point out a leading feature in the books; and they must have been more than thoughtful to penetrate the secret domestic sorrows of the family and take them into account in characterising their written productions. A living author is known to the world by his works only, or, if not so, it is with his works alone that the public are concerned; and he has no cause of complaint if he is fairly judged by them without any allowance for the private conditions under which they were produced. On the other hand, he has the corresponding right to demand that personal considerations and private information shall not be dragged in as elements of literary judgment, and that his publicity as an artist shall give no pretext for invading the seclusion of his private life. While we disregard the weak and unfounded complaints we so often hear of "unsympathising" criticism, we must all allow that no terms of reprobation are too strong for forced and unwarrantable intrusions into the personal sanctuary. When an author is dead and his biography is written, especially what may be called a private biography as distinguished from a simple record of public actions, some of the restrictions never justly infringed during the lifetime are removed. The sphere which is voluntarily opened to the public measures the range of the critic. By the very act of admitting us to the interior of a life and character we are invited to examine it; and if such a biography is to have any value, opinions on it must be freely formed and freely expressed.

In writing the life of the late Mrs. Nicholls, Mrs. Gaskell had more than ordinary difficulties to contend with. She had to depict an existence whose interest consisted in the singular characteristics of the narrow home in which it passed, in the spectacle of genius contending against circumstance, not on the wide stage of the world, but within the walls of one household, in