To the poise and proportion contributed to satire by the emphasis on the quality of humor, must be added the justice that comes from a rationalized sympathy, and from the counter, positive element which restores the balance pulled down by destructive criticism. A striking example of both is furnished by Meredith in his explanation of one of his characters. No pretender has ever been more skillfully pursued or more thoroughly unmasked than the ambitious daughter of the great Mel. After such treatment no one before this time could have presented so fairly the case for the defendant:[461] “Now the two Generals--Rose Jocelyn and the Countess de Saldar--had brought matters to this pass; and from the two tactical extremes: the former by openness and dash; the latter by subtlety and her own interpretations of the means extended to her by Providence. I will not be so bold as to state which of the two I think right. Good and evil work together in this world. If the Countess had not woven the tangle, and gained Evan time, Rose would never have seen his blood,--never have had her spirit hurried out of all shows and forms and habits of thought, up to the gates of existence, as it were, where she took him simply as God created him, and clave to him.” Thackeray and Trollope also apologize for some of the people they ridicule, but with this characteristic difference, that Thackeray bespeaks your indulgence for a Pendennis or a Philip on the Horatian ground, “_Nam vitiis nemo sine nascitur; optimus ille est_ _Qui minimis urgetur._” But Trollope conscientiously reminds the reader that his picture of an Archdeacon Grantly, a George Bertram, even a Mrs. Proudie, is one-sided; that their dramatic and amusing faults have been allowed to overshadow their less entertaining but existent virtues; and that to know all would be, not to forgive all, but to forgive judiciously. His story of the childish lapse and manly recovery of the vicar Robarts concludes with the reflection, “A man may be very imperfect and yet worth a great deal.”[462] This is a clear, cool discrimination far more difficult to attain than Thackeray’s nebulous implication that though this man is certainly very imperfect and not worth a great deal yet his dear womenkind excuse him and we adore them for it. George Eliot is too stern to do much excusing, but she always gives due weight to “the terrible coercion of our deeds.” If she insists on the baleful effect of yielding to temptation, she insists also on an appreciation of the tempting force. She analyzes the culprit:[463] “The action which before commission has been seen with that blended common-sense and fresh untarnished feeling which is the healthy eye of the soul, is looked at afterwards with the lens of apologetic ingenuity, through which all things that men call beautiful and ugly are seen to be made up of textures very much alike.” But at the same time she warns his judges: