Watts is now one of our most esteemed critics.
I had a close acquaintance with Harrison Ainsworth among novelistic editors; he tried to obtain for me the separate publication of “Valdarno,” and, failing, wrote me his confident belief that it must be resuscitated one day.
Ainsworth was a manly and handsome-looking person. His romances gave great pleasure to the readers of his time, which showed how willing people are to live others’ lives without the penalties, though they would very firmly decline living their own over again, without the experience they had too late acquired.
I suppose, in reading every novel, one tastes of all the vices and virtues that have ever been indulged in. One likes to be great and generous vicariously; one even enjoys the sufferings of the wicked at second hand, and to commit even murder on the like terms.
We have all the character, in substrata, not only of the savage, but of the wild beast, of the vulture, of the shark, of the boa constrictor, of the clawed crab, of the animalcule itself. Some feel this, some are wholly unconscious of it until it is accidentally roused, some possess it only in a state of inanimate suppression.
A novel founded on vulture life would have a great run. It should dwell on the domestic virtues of the bird, and show how it held an appointment under Providence to follow in the wake of armies.
One of the finest novels I have read of late years is that of Mr. Eden, entitled “George Donnington,” a work replete with experiences, sympathetic in character, in purpose wise; less a fiction than a narrative of true Russian life, and written with as firm a hand as was ever trained for literary success.
Though I could wish to have done with the “strange eventful history” of a life, thus lived over again, I must not rush on too fast, but must revert to “Parables and Tales.”
The publisher of “Madeline” asked me to add four more poems to “Old Souls,” and the three others of the same metre, for an illustrated work; accordingly, I gave him “Mother and Child,” “The Blind Boy,” “The Cripple,” and “Old Morality.”
One morning at Cheyne Walk I read “The Cripple” to Rossetti and Hüffer, and saw them both in tears.