Histeaching seems now too strident and too
optimistic and too shallow. It cannot be said that his daring isaltogether
successful.
Yet it is a capricious power and highly
intermittent. It did not much matter, perhaps, whether his audiencewas cultivated or
simple.
The impersonal side of lifeis given its due place
in the scheme. He actually set foot inAthens; he saw Rome; he read his Thucydides in
Sicily before hedied.
She waited, wisely, until her escape had given
hersome measure of knowledge and proportion. To neithercould he speak the simple
language of daily life.
Hume the medium, or the politics of Napoleon,
Emperor of theFrench. A birds-eye view of fictionshows us no gentlemen in Dickens;
no working men in Thackeray.
What damage had her life done her as a poet? They
are no longer, as they used to be when Chaucer wrote,simply themselves. For that
reason, no doubt, the author hascurbed his redundance and pruned his speech. Life
was changing round him; his comment upon life waschanging too.
He becomes rich; he becomesrespectable; he buys an
evening suit and dines with peers. Romney, in short, rants and reels like any of
thoseElizabethan heroes whom Mrs. Itwould have to fall back upon the immensity of
the soul and upon thebrotherhood of man. The writer has dined upon lentils; he gets
up at five; hewalks across London; he finds Mr. That the victim is a wax model and
not entirelyliving flesh and blood is perhaps true.
Browning had warned so imperiously outof her modern
living-room.