public would have worked more clearly had she never
seemed to swerve from the high principles she expressed, or been led
away by the disturbing forces of a nature calm only on the surface.
Nothing is more baffling than the incomplete revelations of a very
complex order of mind, with its many-sided sympathies and its apparent
contradictions. The self-justification she puts forward for her errors
is sometimes sophistical, but not for that insincere. She is not trying
to make us her dupes; she is the dupe herself of her dangerous
eloquence. But her moral worth so infinitely outweighed the alloy as to
leave but little call, or even warrant, for dwelling on the latter. "If
I come back to you," said her old literary patron Delatouche, into whose
disfavor she had fallen awhile, when he came years after to ask for the
restitution of the friendship he had slighted, "it is that I cannot help
myself, and your qualities surpass your defects."

To pass from herself to her books, no one has made more frank, clear and
unchanging confession of their heart's faith or their head's principles.
Her creed was that which has been, and ever will be in some guise, the
creed of minds of a certain order. She did not invent it. Poets,
moralists, theologians, have proclaimed it before her and after her. She
found for it a fresh mode of expression, one answering to the needs of
the age to which she belonged.

It is in the union of rare artistic genius with an almost as rare and
remarkable power of enthusiasm for moral and spiritual truth that lies
her distinguishing strength. Most of her novels--all her best
novels--share this characteristic of seeming to be prompted by the
double and equal inspiration of an artistic and a moral purpose.
Wherever one of these preponderates greatly, or is wanting altogether,
the novel falls below her usual standard.

For in several qualities reckoned important her work is open to
criticism. "Plan, or the want of it," she acknowledges, with a sort of
complacency, "has always been my weak point." Thus whilst in many of her
compositions, especially the shorter novels, the construction leaves
little to be desired, _Consuelo_ is only one among many instances in
which all ordinary rules of symmetry and proportion are set at naught.
Sometimes the leading idea assumed naturally and easily a perfect form;
if simple, as in _Andre_ and her pastorals, it usually did so; but if
complex, she troubled herself little over the ta