"Rhoda Fleming," he writes, "left me with increased wonder that its author has not a more generally recognised position. He is the only living English prose-writer with a real mind-kingdom of his own. The story moves like fate—as inevitably, as cruelly (the white sacrifice!), but just misses being dramatic. Why does he not write a play? He could; perhaps something better than has been done for centuries."
A year earlier he had written:—"When you say Hugo is 'so false' you must mean not quite practical. Mrs. Gaskell's 'Ruth' is 'false' if you like, as well as irrelevant. Its real tendency is the reverse of the authoress' ostensible purpose. The woman becomes a partner in a union perfectly unpolluted and humane, but unauthorised, and even this is made inevitable. The Quaker element then turns it into tragedy, and the climax is effected by a person who is a sufficiently remarkable instance of a figure created by an apostle of mild propriety. He would have upset the whole scheme of the Redemption by making the good Jesus sin the sin of hate. This worthy, but rather Pharisaical Methodist—this large-boned man of substance who makes responses louder than anyone else—this nameless monster, whose foul-mouthed brawling on discovery of the woman's history while under him as a governess, is made the insult in answer to which her protector produces the plea (which is the purpose of the book); who, perhaps, takes his place as the best type in fiction of the most hateful character that the varying conditions of climate and creed ever yet conspired to produce on this, God's flowery earth—comes duly in for his share in the comprehensive wash-brush at the finish. By the simple expedient of turning his hair from black to white he is qualified for service at the heroine's peaceful tomb, where he joins in dropping the charitable tear.
"The beautiful touches in this work are the seal of its futility, arising as they do from the character of Ruth—an impossible incarnation of all the virtues and graces—a sort of virgin mother, at last in fact a crowned saint; and I cannot believe in her story, perhaps from being too young. It may be that the remembrance of Ruth and other such works, while reading Fantine, misled me; that the escape from the high-pew and hassock flavour of Methodism to Hugo's 'prophetic soul of the wide world' blinded. Yet, when a work like 'Les Misérables,' with the prodigious activity of its dramatic impulse, takes in its sweep the story of Fantine, something may surely be expected, if ever a writer is to be adequate on such a subject, and, I cannot but think, rightly. The 'eternal Priestess of Humanity blasted for the Sins of the People'—Fantine is just the thought dramatised.
"Essentially hopeless and inexorable, surpassing the limit of horror permissible in art.... And still the nameless agonies of the martyr's death are forgotten for the angel-benediction at her grave. And is it nothing to have achieved that this benediction should have been possible after such a life?...
"Yes, 'Les Misérables,' notwithstanding incidental impossibilities, albeit ever in extremes, looms in my mind as incomparably the greatest thing in fiction with which I am acquainted, and the longer ago it gets since I read it and the more I read, the stronger this impression grows. It seemed to me that the touches of truth in this 'false' work were quite fearful in their power; such, for instance, of that gang of convicts being jolted by in the van, 'their heads knocking together.' He produces the physical effects of actual presence at what he describes. Of course, it violates every possible canon from the 'Unities' downwards; in fact, it might almost be made the basis of a new law of multiplicities."
Some years later, in 1892, he wrote his impression on reading Hardy's masterpiece: "I have just finished 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles.' You may have noticed a passage in Vol. I. running thus (chap. xvi.):—'Long thatched sheds stretched round the enclosure, their slopes encrusted with vivid green moss, and their eaves supported by wooden posts rubbed to a glossy smoothness by the flanks of infinite cows and calves of bygone years, now passed to an oblivion almost inconceivable in its profundity.'
"If a man speaks so of cattle how must he feel towards his human brothers and sisters! How strong must be in him that profoundest of poetic passions, the 'carent quia vate sacro' feeling! For, no doubt, sometimes in these quiet country places a heart of such gold as Tess's throbs away in complete obscurity its allotted number of pulses. Our temper has altered from the time when this emotion was dismissed with a 'Let not ambition mock their useful toil,' etc., and Hardy has fully realised the appalling paths of such tragedies in humble life. 'This time,' he seems to have said, 'this time no mincing and no hedging. Let the disdainful smilers and those others who shift all responsibilities on to Providence look to themselves.'
"There are passages of infinite pathos in this story: the 'too-late' meeting of Tess with Angel Clare in the sea-side lodging, and the terrific scene immediately after, when Angel is gone and she is left to sob out her distraction; where Tess says to Angel, 'Why didn't you stay and love me when I was sixteen with my little sisters and brothers?':—the long letter she writes about a year after Angel has left her, and where she practises the ballads that he had liked best, while working in the field, 'the tears running down her cheeks all the while at the thought that, perhaps, he would not after all come to hear her, and the silly words of the songs resounding in painful mockery of the aching heart of the singer.' And, earlier, the baptising by Tess of her own infant, and—perhaps lying nearest of all to the fountain of tears—those glimpses of her early innocence. 'Tess's pride would not allow her to turn her head again to learn what her father's meaning was, if he had any, and thus she moved on with the whole body to the enclosure where there was to be dancing on the green' ... when one knows against what fate the poor girl is going! But is it not all just a little too cruel? To represent such adorable goodness, and sweetness, and faithfulness as being rewarded with the actual gibbet—is not this a little hard, even on Providence? The unsparingly tragic ending is not the only thing, nor even the main thing that distinguishes this from other stories dealing with the same sort of subject.
"In George Eliot's Hetty we evidently have to do with a character quite other than Tess's. The imputation of depravity attached to the fact that Hetty, when scarcely more than a child, looked long in the glass and thought how fine it would be to be a lady—this seems to me an exceedingly miserable evidence of the somewhat crude vice of character by which, notwithstanding George Eliot's immense genius, her sympathy with the simple-hearted was, in certain cases, marred or destroyed. But Hetty's character must be taken as it is revealed in action and intention, and she abandons her infant, whereas the soul of Tess goes out in an agony of endeavour to preserve hers, and, long after its death, she exposes herself to ridicule by tending its outcast's grave. In Hetty's dreams and schemes, again no thought of her parents and people or hope of bettering their lot has place, while Tess at the darkest moment of her via dolorosa—at Stonehenge, just before God finally forsakes her—thinks of her sister 'Liza-Lu, and secures a protector for those she is leaving behind.