means doubles of each other: and nature herself could not turn out half
a dozen girls more subtly and yet more sufficiently differentiated than
Catherine and Elizabeth, Marianne and Fanny, Elinor and Emma, and
finally the three sisters of _Persuasion_, the other (quite other)
Elizabeth, Mary, and Anne. The "ruts of the brain" in novelists are a
by-word. There are none here.

In these two great writers of English novel there is, really for the
first time, the complementary antithesis after which people have often
gone (I fear it must be said) wool-gathering elsewhere. The amateurs of
cosmopolitan literature, I believe, like to find it in Stendhal and
Michelet. They praise the former for his delicate and pitiless
psychological analysis. It had been anticipated a dozen years, nay,
nearly twenty years, before he saw the Beresina: and was being given out
in print at about the very moment of that uncomfortable experience, and
before he himself published anything, by a young English lady--a lady if
ever there was one and English if any person ever was--in a country
parsonage in Hampshire or in hired houses, quite humdrum and commonplace
to the commonplace and humdrum imagination, at Bath and Southampton.
They praise Michelet for his enthusiastic and multiform apprehension of
the plastic reality of the past, his re-creation of it, his putting of
it, live and active, before the present. The thing had been done, twenty
years earlier again, by a Scotch advocate who had deliberately turned
from poetic form, though he retained poetic imagination, and who did not
disdain not to make a fool of himself, as Michelet, with all his genius,
did again and again. Of all the essentials of the two manners of
fictitious creation--Michelet's was not fictitious, but he almost made
it so, and Stendhal's was not historical, but he almost made it so
likewise--Scott and Miss Austen had set the types, given the methods,
arranged the processes as definitely as Fust, or Coster, or Gutenberg,