Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/90

90 be here a pleasant task to show. The criticism of which the leading passages are about to be laid before the reader, is especially referred to, because it presents in the clearest language, and with admirable ability, all the strength of the objections that might not unfairly be urged against the false direction of her powers, and the inconsistencies, wilful or unconscious, that often defeated her eager search after truth, and disfigured her disquisitions upon life.

Having defined it to be a book "written on the greatest misery-possible principle," and as surpassing most others in its "prodigious capacity for wretchedness"—the actors and the action belonging more to a dream than to life—yet destined to live in a "vague and impassioned remembrance," the critic glances at the more real portions of the work, and these he finds far away from the main conduct and tendency of the story.

"Francesca has nothing in common with the Court of the youthful Louis the Fourteenth, but Miss Landon has. We are, consequently, taken there; and nothing can be better than the scenes we are suffered to have part in. They are a delicious mixture of the imaginative and real. What a gorgeous tapestry she unrolls to introduce us to a more gorgeous company within; and with what brilliant truth she realizes them—what a nice perception of the various shades of character, yet all of the Court—courtly. In the most real things that are said or done, there would seem to be nothing real. Everybody talks with a sort of effort, and yet talks to the point, and with cleverness. Courtiers are not less successful because they strive to be so. Every one of them has something of a heart, though, like the Medecin malgré lui, they have every one of them altered its position. They are human beings, and yet they are courtiers—they seem, on all truthful and material points, to wink and shut their apprehensions up, and yet how full of apprehensions they are—even how wise, 'seeing through all things with their half-shut eyes.' We never saw court-scenes drawn so completely to the life as they are drawn in 'Francesca Carrara.'

"The whole book, indeed, why should we hesitate to say,