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To Mr. Chorley

Casa Guidi:  November 25 [1859].

My dear Friend,—­I thank you with all my heart for your most graceful and touching dedication,[71] and do assure you that I feel it both as honour and as pleasure.

And yet, do you know, Robert says that you might peradventure, by the dedication of your book to me, mean a covert lecture, or sarcasm, who knows?  Even if you did, the kindness of the personal address would make up for it.  Who wouldn’t bear both lecture and sarcasm from anyone who begins by speaking so?  Therefore I am honoured and pleased and grateful all the same—­yes, and will be.

But, dear Mr. Chorley, you don’t silence me, notwithstanding.  The spell of your dedication hasn’t fastened me up in an oak for ever.  Your book is very clever; your characters very incisively given; princess and patriots admirably cut out (and up!); half truths everywhere, to which one says ‘How true!’ But one might as well (and better) say ‘How false!’ seeing that, dear Mr. Chorley, it does really take two halves to make a whole, and we know it.  The whole truth is not here—­not even suggested here—­and let me add that the half truth on this occasion is cruel.

One thing is ignored in the book.  Under all the ridiculousness, under all the wickedness even of such men and women, lies a cause, a right inherent, a wrong committed.  The cant presupposes a doctrine, and the pretension a real heroism.  Your best people (in your book) seem to have no notion of this.  Your heroine deserves to be a victim, not because she was rash and ignorant, but because she was selfish and foolish.  The world wasn’t lost for her because she loved—­either a cause or a man—­but because she wanted change and excitement.  If she had felt on the abstract question as I have known women to feel, even when they have acted like fools, I should pity her more.  As it is, the lesson was necessary.  If she had not married rashly an Italian birbante she would have married rashly an English blackguard, and I myself see small difference in the kinds.  With you, however, to your mind, it is different; and in this view of yours seems to me to lie the main fault of your book.  You evidently think that God made only the English.  The English are a peculiar people.  Their worst is better than the best of the exterior nations.  Over the rest of the world He has cast out His shoe.  Even supposing that a foreigner does, by extraordinary exception, some good thing, it’s only in reaction from having murdered somebody last year, or at least left his children to starve the year before.  Truth, generosity, nobleness of will and mind, these things do not exist beyond the influence of the ‘Times’ newspaper and the ‘Saturday Review.’  (By the way, it would be extraordinary if it were so.’)

Well, I have lived thirteen years on the Continent, and, far as England is from Italy, far as the heavens are from the earth, I dissent from you, dissent from you, dissent from you.