TO DEAD AUTHORS

I. To W. M. Thackeray.

Sir,--There are many things that stand in the way of the critic when
he has a mind to praise the living. He may dread the charge of writing
rather to vex a rival than to exalt the subject of his applause. He
shuns the appearance of seeking the favour of the famous, and would not
willingly be regarded as one of the many parasites who now advertise
each movement and action of contemporary genius. 'Such and such men of
letters are passing their summer holidays in the Val d'Aosta,' or
the Mountains of the Moon, or the Suliman Range, as it may happen. So
reports our literary 'Court Circular,' and all our _Precieuses_ read the
tidings with enthusiasm. Lastly, if the critic be quite new to the world
of letters, he may superfluously fear to vex a poet or a novelist by the
abundance of his eulogy. No such doubts perplex us when, with all our
hearts, we would commend the departed; for they have passed almost
beyond the reach even of envy; and to those pale cheeks of theirs no
commendation can bring the red.

You, above all others, were and remain without a rival in your
many-sided excellence, and praise of you strikes at none of those who
have survived your day. The increase of time only mellows your renown,
and each year that passes and brings you no successor does but sharpen
the keenness of our sense of loss. In what other novelist, since
Scott was worn down by the burden of a forlorn endeavour, and died
for honour's sake, has the world found so many of the fairest gifts
combined? If we may not call you a poet (for the first of English
writers of light verse did not seek that crown), who that was less than
a poet ever saw life with a glance so keen as yours, so steady, and so
sane? Your pathos was never cheap, your laughter never forced; your
sigh was never the pulpit trick of the preacher. Your funny people--your
Costigans and Fokers--were not mere characters of trick and catch-word,
were not empty comic masks. Behind each the human heart was beating; and
ever and again we were allowed to see the features of the man.

Thus fiction in your hands was not simply a profession, like another,
but a constant reflection of the whole surface of life: a repeated echo
of its laughter and its complaint. Others have written, and not written
badly, with the stolid professional regularity of the clerk at his desk;
you, like the Scholar Gipsy, might have said that 'it needs heaven-sent
m