Is it not so?  And should we try to counteract this influence?  Can we indeed counteract it?

* * * * *

Why do you like Miss Austen so very much?  I am puzzled on that point.  What induced you to say that you would have rather written Pride and Prejudice, or Tom Jones, than any of the Waverley Novels?

I had not seen Pride and Prejudice till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book.  And what did I find?  An accurate, daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck.  I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.  These observations will probably irritate you, but I shall run the risk.

Now I can understand admiration of George Sand; for though I never saw any of her works which I admired throughout (even Consuelo, which is the best, or the best that I have read, appears to me to couple strange extravagance with wondrous excellence), yet she has a grasp of mind, which, if I cannot fully comprehend, I can very deeply respect; she is sagacious and profound;—­Miss Austen is only shrewd and observant.

Am I wrong—­or, were you hasty in what you said?  If you have time, I should be glad to hear further on this subject; if not, or if you think the questions frivolous, do not trouble yourself to reply.

TO THE SAME

The argument continued

18 Jan. 1848.

Dear Sir,

I must write you one more note, though I had not intended to trouble you again so soon.  I have to agree with you, and to differ from you.

You correct my crude remarks on the subject of the ‘influence’; well, I accept your definition of what the effects of that influence should be; I recognize the wisdom of your rules for its regulation....

What a strange lecture comes next in your letter!  You say I must familiarize my mind with the fact, that ’Miss Austen is not a poetess, has no “sentiment"’ (you scornfully enclose the word in inverted commas), ’no eloquence, none of the ravishing enthusiasm of poetry’,—­and then you add, I must ’learn to acknowledge her as one of the greatest artists, of the greatest painters of human character, and one of the writers with the nicest sense of means to an end that ever lived’.

The last point only will I ever acknowledge.

Can there be a great artist without poetry?

What I call—­what I will bend to, as a great artist then—­cannot be destitute of the divine gift.  But by poetry, I am sure, you understand something different to what I do, as you do by ‘sentiment’.  It is poetry, as I comprehend the word, which elevates that masculine George Sand, and makes out of something coarse, something Godlike.  It is ‘sentiment’, in my sense of the term—­sentiment jealously hidden, but genuine, which extracts the venom from that formidable Thackeray, and converts what might be corrosive poison into purifying elixir.