concentrated in and on
Marianne herself, and the fact that this is so at once makes
continuation superfluous, and gives the novel its place in the history
of fiction. We have quite enough, as it is, to show us--as the Princess
Augusta said to Fanny Burney of the ill-starred last of French "Mesdames
Royales"--"what sort of a girl she is." And her biographer has made her
a very interesting sort of girl, and himself in making her so, a very
interesting, and almost entirely novel, sort of novelist. To say that
she is a wholly attractive character would be entirely false, except
from the point of view of the pure student of art. She is technically
virtuous, which is, of course, greatly to her credit.[333] She is not
bad-blooded, but if there were such a word as "good-blooded" it could
hardly be applied to her. With all her preserving borax- or
formalin-like touch of "good form," she is something of a minx. She is
vain, selfish--in fact wrapped up in self--without any sense of other
than technical honour. But she is very pretty (which covers a multitude
of sins), and she is really clever.

[Sidenote: Importance of Marianne herself.]

Yet the question at issue is not whether one can approve of Marianne,
nor whether one can like her, nor even whether, approving and liking her
or not, one could fall in love with her "for her comely face and for her
fair bodie," as King Honour did in the ballad, and as _homo rationalis_
usually, though not invariably, does fall in love. The question is
whether Marivaux has, in her, created a live girl, and to what extent he
has mastered the details of his creation. The only critical answer, I
think, must be that he has created such a girl, and that he has not left
her a mere outline or type, but has furnished the house as well as built
it. She is, in the particular meaning on which Mr. Hardy's defenders
insist, as "pure" a "woman" as Tess herself. And if there is a good deal
missing from her which fortunately some women have, there is nothing in
her which some women have not, and not so very much which the majority
of women have not, in this or that degree. It is difficult not to smile
when one compares her quintessence with the complicated and elusive
caricatures of womanhood which some modern novel-writers--noisily hailed
as _gyno_sophists--have put together, and been complimented on putting
together. What is more, she is perhaps the first nearly complete
character of the kind that had been p