bited in the sketch of Seraphael from
first to last: not to mention the happiness of the name, of which
this is by no means a single instance, and the fact of his having no
_pramomen_, both of which so insignificant atoms in themselves lift him
at once a line above the level in the reader's sympathy,--it was a most
difficult thing to present such delicacy and lightness, and yet to
preserve "the awful greatness of his lonely genius," as somewhere else
she calls it; but all must confess that it is done, and perfectly. It
is not alone in Seraphael that this strength is shown; a new mould of
character in fiction is given us,--masculine characters which, though
light and airy, are yet brilliant and strong, most sweet, and surcharged
with loveliness. It is this perfect sweetness that constitutes half
the charm of her books,--for in the only one where it is deficient,
"Beatrice Reynolds," the whole fails. One feels sure that it was never
deficient in herself, that her own heart must have been overflowing with
warm and cordial tenderness,--and if any testimony were wanting, we
should have it in her evident love of children. It is only by love that
understanding comes, and no one ever understood children better or
painted them half so well: they are no mites of puny perfection, no
angels astray, no Psyches in all the agonies of the bursting chrysalis,
but real little flesh-and-blood people in pinafores, approached by
nobody's hand so nearly as George Eliot's. They are flawless: the boy
who, having swung himself giddy, felt "the world turning round, as
papa says it does, nurse,"--the other boy, who, immured in studies and
dreams, found all life to be "a fairy-tale book with half the leaves
uncut,"--the charming little snow-drop of a Carlotta, "who would sit
next him, would stick her tiny fork into his face, with a morsel of
turkey at the end of it, would poke crumbs into his mouth with her
finger, would put up her lips to kiss him, would say, every moment, 'I
like you much,--much!' with all Davy's earnestness, though with just
so much of her mother's modesty as made her turn pink and shy, and put
herself completely over the chair into Seraphael's lap when we laughed
at her." And Philippa, and Philippa's conversation, capers, and cat!
an impossibility to those who have never experienced her whirlwinds of
exuberance,--and to those who have, a reproduction of the drollest days
of their existence. Never was there a personage so perfect