Laura, in ‘Pendennis,’ is a yet more fatal mistake. She is drawn with every generous feeling, every good gift. We do not complain that she loves that poor creature Pendennis, for she loved him in her childhood. She grew up with that love in her heart; it came between her and the perception of his faults; it is a necessity indivisible from her nature. Hallowed, through its constancy, therein alone would lie its best excuse, its beauty and its truth. But Laura, faithless to that first affection; Laura, waked up to the appreciation of a far more manly and noble nature, in love with Warrington, and then going back to Pendennis, and marrying him! Such infirmity might be true of some women, but not of such a woman as Laura; we resent the inconsistency, the indelicacy of the portrait.
And then Lady Castlewood,—so evidently a favourite of the author, what shall we say of her? The virtuous woman, par excellence, who “never sins and never forgives,” who never resents, nor relents, nor repents; the mother, who is the rival of her daughter; the mother, who for years is the confidante of a man’s delirious passion for her own child, and then consoles him by marrying him herself! O Mr. Thackeray! this will never do! such women may exist, but to hold them up as examples of excellence, and fit objects of our best sympathies, is a fault, and proves a low standard in ethics and in art. “When an author presents to us a heroine whom we are called upon to admire, let him at least take care that she is admirable.” If in these, and in some other instances, Thackeray has given us cause of offence, in the lectures we may thank him for some amends: he has shown us what he conceives true womanhood and true manliness ought to be; so with this expression of gratitude, and a far deeper debt of gratitude left unexpressed, I close his book, and say, good night!
Notes on Art.
96.
Sometimes, in thoughtful moments, I am struck by those beautiful analogies between things apparently dissimilar—those awful approximations between things apparently far asunder—which many people would call fanciful and imaginary, but they seem to bring all God’s creation, spiritual and material, into one comprehensive whole; they give me, thus associated, a glimpse, a perception of that overwhelming unity which we call the universe, the multitudinous ONE.
Thus the principle of the highest ideal in art, as conceived by the Greeks, and unsurpassed in its purity and beauty, lay in considering well the characteristics which distinguish the human form from the brute form; and then, in rendering the human form, the first aim was to soften down, or, if possible, throw out wholly, those characteristics which belong to the brute nature, or are common to the brute and the man; and the next, to bring into prominence and even enlarge the proportions of those manifestations of forms which distinguish humanity; till, at last, the human merged into the divine, and the God in look, in limb, in feature, stood revealed.