Hours in a Library, Volume 3: New Edition, with AdditionsStephen, Leslie
History
Hours in a Library, Volume 3: New Edition, with Additions
Stephen, Leslie
English literature -- History and criticism
Now M. Paul Emanuel, admirable and amiable as he is, never carries us
into the higher regions of thought. We are told, even ostentatiously,
of the narrow prejudices which he shares, though they do not make
him harsh and uncharitable. The prejudices were obvious in this case
to the creator, because her own happened to be of a different kind.
The 'Tory and clergyman's daughter' was rather puzzled by finding
that a bigoted Papist with a Jesuit education might still be a good
man, and points out conscientiously the defects which she ascribes to
his early training. But the mere fact of the narrowness, the want of
familiarity with a wider sphere of thought, the acceptance of a narrow
code of belief and morality, does not strike her as in itself having
either a comic or a melancholy side. M. Paul has the wrong set of
prejudices, but is not as wrong as prejudiced; and therefore we feel
that a Sterne, or, say, a George Sand, whilst doing equal justice to
M. Emanuel's excellent qualities, would have had a feeling (which in
her was altogether wanting) of his limitation and his incongruity
with the great system of the world. Seen from an intellectual point
of view, placed in his due relation to the great currents of thought
and feeling of the time, we should have been made to feel the pathetic
and humorous aspects of M. Emanuel's character, and he might have been
equally a living individual and yet a type of some more general idea.
The philosopher might ask, for example, what is the exact value of
unselfish heroism guided by narrow theories or employed on unworthy
tasks; and the philosophic humourist or artist might embody the answer
in a portrait of M. Emanuel considered from a cosmic or a cosmopolitan
point of view. From the lower standpoint accessible to Miss Brontë he
is still most attractive; but we see only his relations to the little
scholastic circle, and have no such perception as the greatest writers
would give us of his relations to the universe, or, as the next order
would give, of his relations to the great world without.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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