honour is scantly saved. It is never an attestation of a value,
or even of our imperfect sense of one, it is never a tribute to
any truth at all, that we shall represent that value badly. It
never makes up, artistically, for an artist's dim feeling about a
thing that he shall "do" the thing as ill as possible. There
are better ways than that, the best of all of which is to begin
with less stupidity.

It may be answered meanwhile, in regard to Shakespeare's and to
George Eliot's testimony, that their concession to the
"importance" of their Juliets and Cleopatras and Portias (even
with Portia as the very type and model of the young person
intelligent and presumptuous) and to that of their Hettys and
Maggies and Rosamonds and Gwendolens, suffers the abatement that
these slimnesses are, when figuring as the main props of the
theme, never suffered to be sole ministers of its appeal, but
have their inadequacy eked out with comic relief and underplots,
as the playwrights say, when not with murders and battles and the
great mutations of the world. If they are shown as "mattering"
as much as they could possibly pretend to, the proof of it is in
a hundred other persons, made of much stouter stuff; and each
involved moreover in a hundred relations which matter to THEM
concomitantly with that one. Cleopatra matters, beyond bounds, to
Antony, but his colleagues, his antagonists, the state of Rome
and the impending battle also prodigiously matter; Portia matters
to Antonio, and to Shylock, and to the Prince of Morocco, to the
fifty aspiring princes, but for these gentry there are other
lively concerns; for Antonio, notably, there are Shylock and
Bassanio and his lost ventures and the extremity of his
predicament. This extremity indeed, by the same token, matters to