Andrew Lang

Letters to Dead Authors Andrew Lang

Thus fiction in your hands was not simply a profession, like another, but a constantreflection of the whole surface of life: a repeated echo of its laughter and itscomplaint. Others have written, and not written badly, with the stolid professionalregularity of the clerk at his desk; you, like the Scholar Gipsy, might have said that "it needsheaven-sent moments for this skill." There are, it will not surprise you, some honourablewomen and a few men who call you a cynic; who speak of "the withered world ofThackerayan satire;" who think your eyes were ever turned to the sordid aspects of life-tothe mother-in-law who threatens to "take away her silver bread-basket;" to the intriguer, the sneak, the termagant; to the Beckys, and Barnes Newcomes, and Mrs. Mackenzies ofthis world. The quarrel of these sentimentalists is really with life, not with you; they might as wisely blame Monsieur Buffon because there are snakes in his Natural History. Had younot impaled certain noxious human insects, you would have better pleased Mr. Ruskin; hadyou confined yourself to such performances, you would have been more dear to the NeoBalzacian school in fiction