This is no place for a detailed examination of the comparison, as to
which I shall only say that I do not think Thackeray has anything to
fear from it. Valerie herself is, beyond all doubt, a powerful study
of the "strange woman," enforcing the Biblical view of that personage
with singular force and effectiveness. But her methods are coarser and
more commonplace than Becky's; she never could have long sustained
such an ordeal as the tenure of the house in Curzon Street without
losing even an equivocal position in decent English society; and it
must always be remembered that she was under the orders, so to speak,
of Lisbeth, and inspired by her.
Lisbeth herself, on the other hand, is not one of a class; she stands
alone as much as Becky herself does. It is, no doubt, an arduous and,
some milky-veined critics would say, a doubtfully healthy or
praiseworthy task to depict almost pure wickedness; it is excessively
hard to render it human; and if the difficulty is not increased, it is
certainly not much lessened by the artist's determination to represent
the malefactress as undiscovered and even unsuspected throughout.
Balzac, however, has surmounted these difficulties with almost
complete success. The only advantage--it is no doubt a considerable
one--which he has taken over Shakespeare, when Shakespeare devised
Iago, is that of making Mademoiselle Fischer a person of low birth,
narrow education, and intellectual faculties narrower still, for all
their keenness and intensity.
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