Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/91

Rh that we feel its dangerous tendency, is a book of remarkable power and genius. There is a fiery abundance of informing spirit in it that might have served to crowd with meaning fifty ordinary novels. The entire result would have proved very different if the author could have consented to write more with her intellect and less with her will—more with a looking abroad 'into universality,' and less with an intense consciousness of her own existence alone.

"We do not use these words in the common acceptation of selfishness. We believe the consciousness we speak of in Miss Landon, from these evidences of her writing, to be of a much more generous, though of a scarcely less mistaken order. She suffers, in fact, from a sensibility too extreme—from an acute and even morbid feeling of all that relates to her own impressions, or to the objects and events of her own life. No single feeling they may have left seems to have been forgotten. No object or event that has caused her an emotion seems to have been effaced. Every such emotion, indeed, has worked itself into a passion—and over passions how vain is forced control. Hence, it is that they crowd up wilfully into the pages without coherency or proper neighbourhood. Hence, in this Francesca Carrara, the particular truth, and the general falsehood—the remarkable keenness of feeling and penetration, and the equally remarkable want of final truth, or of large comprehension of mind. For so true it is, that the same intense apprehensions which enables us to discern the first principles of things, and, as in the case of some suffering or experience, seize one particular view of it which shall be individually true, and take up a lasting and passionate abode with us—the same intense feeling is precisely that which prevents our admitting the operation of other causes needful to its wise generalization and control, but interfering with the favourite view we have taken; and thus we are involved in contradictions, endless and wilful.

"There are few who will not readily acknowledge this, after reading half of the first volume of this novel. We may add, that to read so far is to read the whole, for the interest and fascination of the book are extreme. The very characteristic we have been mentioning, indeed, secures this, though it interferes with the general keeping and the final truth of the writing. The passions are kept constantly at work—the pulse that agitates them never ceases to beat. We feel this whether we follow the patient yet passionate sufferings of Guido, the divine truth, and the holy affections of Francesca, or the high-aimed coquetry, the sublime selfishness of the Mancini. We yield to them as they severally move us, unable to reason out of influence the genius which gives birth to all—so various in its powers, so complicated and full of contrast in its sympathies. How nobly could it have realized a