Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined
by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them—the
frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. But it is a mixture of
all these—a composite order of feminine fatuity—that produces the largest
class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as the
_mind-and-millinery_ species. The heroine is usually an heiress,
probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an
amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in
the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle
distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond. Her
eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike
free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb _contralto_ and
a superb intellect; she is perfectly well dressed and perfectly
religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original
tongues. Or it may be that the heroine is not an heiress—that rank and
wealth are the only things in which she is deficient; but she infallibly
gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many matches and
securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as a sort of
crown of righteousness at the end. Rakish men either bite their lips in
impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her
reproofs, which, on appropriate occasions, rise to a lofty strain of
rhetoric; indeed, there is a general propensity in her to make speeches,
and to rhapsodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. In her
recorded conversations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded
conversations amazingly witty. She is understood to have a depth of
insight that looks through and through the shallow theories of
philosophers, and her superior instincts are a sort of dial by which men
have only to set their clocks and watches, and all will go well. The men
play a very subordinate part by her side. You are consoled now and then
by a hint that they have affairs, which keeps you in mind that the
working-day business of the world is somehow being carried on, but
ostensibly the final cause of their existence is that they may accompany
the heroine on her “starring” expedition through life. They see her at a
ball, and they are dazzled; at a flower-show, and they are fascinated; on
a riding excursion, and they are witched by her noble horsemanship; at
church, and they are awed by the sweet solemnity of her demeanor. She is
the ideal woman in feelings, faculties, and flounces. For all this she
as often as not marries the wrong person to begin with, and she suffers
terribly from the plots and intrigues of the vicious baronet; but even
death has a soft place in his heart for such a paragon, and remedies all
mistakes for her just at the right moment. The vicious baronet is sure
to be killed in a duel, and the tedious husband dies in his bed
requesting his wife, as a particular favor to him, to marry the man she
loves best, and having already dispatched a note to the lover informing
him of the comfortable arrangement. Before matters arrive at this
desirable issue our feelings are tried by seeing the noble, lovely, and
gifted heroine pass through many _mauvais moments_, but we have the
satisfaction of knowing that her sorrows are wept into embroidered
pocket-handkerchiefs, that her fainting form reclines on the very best
upholstery, and that whatever vicissitudes she may undergo, from being
dashed out of her carriage to having her head shaved in a fever, she
comes out of them all with a complexion more blooming and locks more
redundant than ever.
We may remark, by the way, that we have been relieved from a serious
scruple by discovering that silly novels by lady novelists rarely
introduce us into any other than very lofty and fashionable society. We
had imagined that destitute women turned novelists, as they turned
governesses, because they had no other “ladylike” means of getting their
bread. On this supposition, vacillating syntax, and improbable incident
had a certain pathos for us, like the extremely supererogatory
pincushions and ill-devised nightcaps that are offered for sale by a
blind man. We felt the commodity to be a nuisance, but we were glad to
think that the money went to relieve the necessitous, and we pictured to
ourselves lonely women struggling for a maintenance, or wives and
daughters devoting themselves to the production of “copy” out of pure
heroism—perhaps to pay their husband’s debts or to purchase luxuries for
a sick father. Under these impressions we shrank from criticising a
lady’s novel: her English might be faulty, but we said to ourselves her
motives are irreproachable; her imagination may be uninventive, but her
patience is untiring. Empty writing was excused by an empty stomach, and
twaddle was consecrated by tears. But no! This theory of ours, like
many other pretty theories, has had to give way before observation.
Women’s silly novels, we are now convinced, are written under totally
different circumstances. The fair writers have evidently never talked to
a tradesman except from a carriage window; they have no notion of the
working-classes except as “dependents;” they think five hundred a year a
miserable pittance; Belgravia and “baronial halls” are their primary
truths; and they have no idea of feeling interest in any man who is not
at least a great landed proprietor, if not a prime minister. It is clear
that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-colored ink and a ruby
pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers’ accounts, and
inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains. It is
true that we are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in
their representations of the high society in which they seem to live; but
then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other form of life. If
their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men,
tradespeople, and cottagers are impossible; and their intellect seems to
have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing both what they _have_ seen
and heard, and what they have _not_ seen and heard, with equal
unfaithfulness.
There are few women, we suppose, who have not seen something of children
under five years of age, yet in “Compensation,” a recent novel of the
mind-and-millinery species, which calls itself a “story of real life,” we
have a child of four and a half years old talking in this Ossianic
fashion:
“‘Oh, I am so happy, dear grand mamma;—I have seen—I have seen such a
delightful person; he is like everything beautiful—like the smell of
sweet flowers, and the view from Ben Lemond;—or no, _better than
that_—he is like what I think of and see when I am very, very happy;
and he is really like mamma, too, when she sings; and his forehead is
like _that distant sea_,’ she continued, pointing to the blue
Mediterranean; ‘there seems no end—no end; or like the clusters of
stars I like best to look at on a warm fine night. . . . Don’t look
so . . . your forehead is like Loch Lomond, when the wind is blowing
and the sun is gone in; I like the sunshine best when the lake is
smooth. . . . So now—I like it better than ever . . . It is more
beautiful still from the dark cloud that has gone over it, _when the
sun suddenly lights up all the colors of the forests and shining
purple rocks_, _and it is all reflected in the waters below_.’”
We are not surprised to learn that the mother of this infant phenomenon,
who exhibits symptoms so alarmingly like those of adolescence repressed
by gin, is herself a phœnix. We are assured, again and again, that she
had a remarkably original in mind, that she was a genius, and “conscious
of her originality,” and she was fortunate enough to have a lover who was
also a genius and a man of “most original mind.”
This lover, we read, though “wonderfully similar” to her “in powers and
capacity,” was “infinitely superior to her in faith and development,” and
she saw in him “‘Agape’—so rare to find—of which she had read and admired
the meaning in her Greek Testament; having, _from her great facility in
learning languages_, read the Scriptures in their original _tongues_.”
Of course! Greek and Hebrew are mere play to a heroine; Sanscrit is no
more than _a_ _b_ _c_ to her; and she can talk with perfect correctness
in any language, except English. She is a polking polyglot, a Creuzer in
crinoline. Poor men. There are so few of you who know even Hebrew; you
think it something to boast of if, like Bolingbroke, you only “understand
that sort of learning and what is writ about it;” and you are perhaps
adoring women who can think slightingly of you in all the Semitic
languages successively. But, then, as we are almost invariably told that
a heroine has a “beautifully small head,” and as her intellect has
probably been early invigorated by an attention to costume and
deportment, we may conclude that she can pick up the Oriental tongues, to
say nothing of their dialects, with the same aërial facility that the
butterfly sips nectar. Besides, there can be no difficulty in conceiving
the depth of the heroine’s erudition when that of the authoress is so
evident.
In “Laura Gay,” another novel of the same school, the heroine seems less
at home in Greek and Hebrew but she makes up for the deficiency by a
quite playful familiarity with the Latin classics—with the “dear old
Virgil,” “the graceful Horace, the humane Cicero, and the pleasant Livy;”
indeed, it is such a matter of course with her to quote Latin that she
does it at a picnic in a very mixed company of ladies and gentlemen,
having, we are told, “no conception that the nobler sex were capable of
jealousy on this subject. And if, indeed,” continues the biographer of
Laura Gray, “the wisest and noblest portion of that sex were in the
majority, no such sentiment would exist; but while Miss Wyndhams and Mr.
Redfords abound, great sacrifices must be made to their existence.” Such
sacrifices, we presume, as abstaining from Latin quotations, of extremely
moderate interest and applicability, which the wise and noble minority of
the other sex would be quite as willing to dispense with as the foolish
and ignoble majority. It is as little the custom of well-bred men as of
well-bred women to quote Latin in mixed parties; they can contain their
familiarity with “the humane Cicero” without allowing it to boil over in
ordinary conversation, and even references to “the pleasant Livy” are not
absolutely irrepressible. But Ciceronian Latin is the mildest form of
Miss Gay’s conversational power. Being on the Palatine with a party of
sight-seers, she falls into the following vein of well-rounded remark:
“Truth can only be pure objectively, for even in the creeds where it
predominates, being subjective, and parcelled out into portions, each of
these necessarily receives a hue of idiosyncrasy, that is, a taint of
superstition more or less strong; while in such creeds as the Roman
Catholic, ignorance, interest, the basis of ancient idolatries, and the
force of authority, have gradually accumulated on the pure truth, and
transformed it, at last, into a mass of superstition for the majority of
its votaries; and how few are there, alas! whose zeal, courage, and
intellectual energy are equal to the analysis of this accumulation, and
to the discovery of the pearl of great price which lies hidden beneath
this heap of rubbish.” We have often met with women much more novel and
profound in their observations than Laura Gay, but rarely with any so
inopportunely long-winded. A clerical lord, who is half in love with
her, is alarmed by the daring remarks just quoted, and begins to suspect
that she is inclined to free-thinking. But he is mistaken; when in a
moment of sorrow he delicately begs leave to “recall to her memory, a
_depôt_ of strength and consolation under affliction, which, until we are
hard pressed by the trials of life, we are too apt to forget,” we learn
that she really has “recurrence to that sacred depôt,” together with the
tea-pot. There is a certain flavor of orthodoxy mixed with the parade of
fortunes and fine carriages in “Laura Gay,” but it is an orthodoxy
mitigated by study of “the humane Cicero,” and by an “intellectual
disposition to analyze.”
“Compensation” is much more heavily dosed with doctrine, but then it has
a treble amount of snobbish worldliness and absurd incident to tickle the
palate of pious frivolity. Linda, the heroine, is still more speculative
and spiritual than Laura Gay, but she has been “presented,” and has more
and far grander lovers; very wicked and fascinating women are
introduced—even a French _lionne_; and no expense is spared to get up as
exciting a story as you will find in the most immoral novels. In fact,
it is a wonderful _pot pourri_ of Almack’s, Scotch second-sight, Mr.
Rogers’s breakfasts, Italian brigands, death-bed conversions, superior
authoresses, Italian mistresses, and attempts at poisoning old ladies,
the whole served up with a garnish of talk about “faith and development”
and “most original minds.” Even Miss Susan Barton, the superior
authoress, whose pen moves in a “quick, decided manner when she is
composing,” declines the finest opportunities of marriage; and though old
enough to be Linda’s mother (since we are told that she refused Linda’s
father), has her hand sought by a young earl, the heroine’s rejected
lover. Of course, genius and morality must be backed by eligible offers,
or they would seem rather a dull affair; and piety, like other things, in
order to be _comme il faut_, must be in “society,” and have admittance to
the best circles.
“Rank and Beauty” is a more frothy and less religious variety of the
mind-and-millinery species. The heroine, we are told, “if she inherited
her father’s pride of birth and her mother’s beauty of person, had in
herself a tone of enthusiastic feeling that, perhaps, belongs to her age
even in the lowly born, but which is refined into the high spirit of wild
romance only in the far descended, who feel that it is their best
inheritance.” This enthusiastic young lady, by dint of reading the
newspaper to her father, falls in love with the _prime minister_, who,
through the medium of leading articles and “the _resumé_ of the debates,”
shines upon her imagination as a bright particular star, which has no
parallax for her living in the country as simple Miss Wyndham. But she
forthwith becomes Baroness Umfraville in her own right, astonishes the
world with her beauty and accomplishments when she bursts upon it from
her mansion in Spring Gardens, and, as you foresee, will presently come
into contact with the unseen _objet aimé_. Perhaps the words “prime
minister” suggest to you a wrinkled or obese sexagenarian; but pray
dismiss the image. Lord Rupert Conway has been “called while still
almost a youth to the first situation which a subject can hold in the
_universe_,” and even leading articles and a _resumé_ of the debates have
not conjured up a dream that surpasses the fact.
“The door opened again, and Lord Rupert Conway entered. Evelyn gave
one glance. It was enough; she was not disappointed. It seemed as
if a picture on which she had long gazed was suddenly instinct with
life, and had stepped from its frame before her. His tall figure,
the distinguished simplicity of his air—it was a living Vandyke, a
cavalier, one of his noble cavalier ancestors, or one to whom her
fancy had always likened him, who long of yore had with an Umfraville
fought the Paynim far beyond the sea. Was this reality?”
Very little like it, certainly.
By and by it becomes evident that the ministerial heart is touched. Lady
Umfraville is on a visit to the Queen at Windsor, and—
“The last evening of her stay, when they returned from riding, Mr.
Wyndham took her and a large party to the top of the Keep, to see the
view. She was leaning on the battlements, gazing from that ‘stately
height’ at the prospect beneath her, when Lord Rupert was by her
side. ‘What an unrivalled view!’ exclaimed she.
“‘Yes, it would have been wrong to go without having been up here.
You are pleased with your visit?’
“‘Enchanted! A Queen to live and die under, to live and die for!’
“‘Ha!’ cried he, with sudden emotion, and with a _eureka_ expression
of countenance, as if he had _indeed found a heart in unison with his
own_.”
The “_eureka_ expression of countenance” you see at once to be prophetic
of marriage at the end of the third volume; but before that desirable
consummation there are very complicated misunderstandings, arising
chiefly from the vindictive plotting of Sir Luttrel Wycherley, who is a
genius, a poet, and in every way a most remarkable character indeed. He
is not only a romantic poet, but a hardened rake and a cynical wit; yet
his deep passion for Lady Umfraville has so impoverished his epigrammatic
talent that he cuts an extremely poor figure in conversation. When she
rejects him, he rushes into the shrubbery and rolls himself in the dirt;
and on recovering, devotes himself to the most diabolical and laborious
schemes of vengeance, in the course of which he disguises himself as a
quack physician and enters into general practice, foreseeing that Evelyn
will fall ill, and that he shall be called in to attend her. At last,
when all his schemes are frustrated, he takes leave of her in a long
letter, written, as you will perceive from the following passage,
entirely in the style of an eminent literary man:
“Oh, lady, nursed in pomp and pleasure, will you ever cast one
thought upon the miserable being who addresses you? Will you ever,
as your gilded galley is floating down the unruffled stream of
prosperity, will you ever, while lulled by the sweetest music—thine
own praises—hear the far-off sigh from that world to which I am
going?”
On the whole, however, frothy as it is, we rather prefer “Rank and
Beauty” to the two other novels we have mentioned. The dialogue is more
natural and spirited; there is some frank ignorance and no pedantry; and
you are allowed to take the heroine’s astounding intellect upon trust,
without being called on to read her conversational refutations of
sceptics and philosophers, or her rhetorical solutions of the mysteries
of the universe.
Writers of the mind-and-millinery school are remarkably unanimous in
their choice of diction. In their novels there is usually a lady or
gentleman who is more or less of a upas tree; the lover has a manly
breast; minds are redolent of various things; hearts are hollow; events
are utilized; friends are consigned to the tomb; infancy is an engaging
period; the sun is a luminary that goes to his western couch, or gathers
the rain-drops into his refulgent bosom; life is a melancholy boon;
Albion and Scotia are conversational epithets. There is a striking
resemblance, too, in the character of their moral comments, such, for
instance, as that “It is a fact, no less true than melancholy, that all
people, more or less, richer or poorer, are swayed by bad example;” that
“Books, however trivial, contain some subjects from which useful
information may be drawn;” that “Vice can too often borrow the language
of virtue;” that “Merit and nobility of nature must exist, to be
accepted, for clamor and pretension cannot impose upon those too well
read in human nature to be easily deceived;” and that “In order to
forgive, we must have been injured.” There is doubtless a class of
readers to whom these remarks appear peculiarly pointed and pungent; for
we often find them doubly and trebly scored with the pencil, and delicate
hands giving in their determined adhesion to these hardy novelties by a
distinct _très vrai_, emphasized by many notes of exclamation. The
colloquial style of these novels is often marked by much ingenious
inversion, and a careful avoidance of such cheap phraseology as can be
heard every day. Angry young gentlemen exclaim, “’Tis ever thus,
methinks;” and in the half hour before dinner a young lady informs her
next neighbor that the first day she read Shakespeare she “stole away
into the park, and beneath the shadow of the greenwood tree, devoured
with rapture the inspired page of the great magician.” But the most
remarkable efforts of the mind-and-millinery writers lie in their
philosophic reflections. The authoress of “Laura Gay,” for example,
having married her hero and heroine, improves the event by observing that
“if those sceptics, whose eyes have so long gazed on matter that they can
no longer see aught else in man, could once enter with heart and soul,
into such bliss as this, they would come to say that the soul of man and
the polypus are not of common origin, or of the same texture.” Lady
novelists, it appears, can see something else besides matter; they are
not limited to phenomena, but can relieve their eyesight by occasional
glimpses of the _noumenon_, and are, therefore, naturally better able
than any one else to confound sceptics, even of that remarkable but to us
unknown school which maintains that the soul of man is of the same
texture as the polypus.
The most pitiable of all silly novels by lady novelists are what we may
call the _oracular_ species—novels intended to expound the writer’s
religious, philosophical, or moral theories. There seems to be a notion
abroad among women, rather akin to the superstition that the speech and
actions of idiots are inspired, and that the human being most entirely
exhausted of common-sense is the fittest vehicle of revelation. To judge
from their writings, there are certain ladies who think that an amazing
ignorance, both of science and of life, is the best possible
qualification for forming an opinion on the knottiest moral and
speculative questions. Apparently, their recipe for solving all such
difficulties is something like this: Take a woman’s head, stuff it with a
smattering of philosophy and literature chopped small, and with false
notions of society baked hard, let it hang over a desk a few hours every
day, and serve up hot in feeble English when not required. You will
rarely meet with a lady novelist of the oracular class who is diffident
of her ability to decide on theological questions—who has any suspicion
that she is not capable of discriminating with the nicest accuracy
between the good and evil in all church parties—who does not see
precisely how it is that men have gone wrong hitherto—and pity
philosophers in general that they have not had the opportunity of
consulting her. Great writers, who have modestly contented themselves
with putting their experience into fiction, and have thought it quite a
sufficient task to exhibit men and things as they are, she sighs over as
deplorably deficient in the application of their powers. “They have
solved no great questions”—and she is ready to remedy their omission by
setting before you a complete theory of life and manual of divinity in a
love story, where ladies and gentlemen of good family go through genteel
vicissitudes, to the utter confusion of Deists, Puseyites, and
ultra-Protestants, and to the perfect establishment of that peculiar view
of Christianity which either condenses itself into a sentence of small
caps, or explodes into a cluster of stars on the three hundred and
thirtieth page. It is true, the ladies and gentlemen will probably seem
to you remarkably little like any you have had the fortune or misfortune
to meet with, for, as a general rule, the ability of a lady novelist to
describe actual life and her fellow-men is in inverse proportion to her
confident eloquence about God and the other world, and the means by which
she usually chooses to conduct you to true ideas of the invisible is a
totally false picture of the visible.
As typical a novel of the oracular kind as we can hope to meet with, is
“The Enigma: a Leaf from the Chronicles of the Wolchorley House.” The
“enigma” which this novel is to solve is certainly one that demands
powers no less gigantic than those of a lady novelist, being neither more
nor less than the existence of evil. The problem is stated and the
answer dimly foreshadowed on the very first page. The spirited young
lady, with raven hair, says, “All life is an inextricable confusion;” and
the meek young lady, with auburn hair, looks at the picture of the
Madonna which she is copying, and—“_There_ seemed the solution of that
mighty enigma.” The style of this novel is quite as lofty as its
purpose; indeed, some passages on which we have spent much patient study
are quite beyond our reach, in spite of the illustrative aid of italics
and small caps; and we must await further “development” in order to
understand them. Of Ernest, the model young clergyman, who sets every
one right on all occasions, we read that “he held not of marriage in the
marketable kind, after a social desecration;” that, on one eventful
night, “sleep had not visited his divided heart, where tumultuated, in
varied type and combination, the aggregate feelings of grief and joy;”
and that, “for the _marketable_ human article he had no toleration, be it
of what sort, or set for what value it might, whether for worship or
class, his upright soul abhorred it, whose ultimatum, the self-deceiver,
was to him THE _great spiritual lie_, ‘living in a vain show, deceiving
and being deceived;’ since he did not suppose the phylactery and enlarged
border on the garment to be _merely_ a social trick.” (The italics and
small caps are the author’s, and we hope they assist the reader’s
comprehension.) Of Sir Lionel, the model old gentleman, we are told that
“the simple ideal of the middle age, apart from its anarchy and
decadence, in him most truly seemed to live again, when the ties which
knit men together were of heroic cast. The first-born colors of pristine
faith and truth engraven on the common soul of man, and blent into the
wide arch of brotherhood, where the primæval law of _order_ grew and
multiplied each perfect after his kind, and mutually interdependent.”
You see clearly, of course, how colors are first engraven on the soul,
and then blent into a wide arch, on which arch of colors—apparently a
rainbow—the law of order grew and multiplied, each—apparently the arch
and the law—perfect after his kind? If, after this, you can possibly
want any further aid toward knowing what Sir Lionel was, we can tell you
that in his soul “the scientific combinations of thought could educe no
fuller harmonies of the good and the true than lay in the primæval pulses
which floated as an atmosphere around it!” and that, when he was sealing
a letter, “Lo! the responsive throb in that good man’s bosom echoed back
in simple truth the honest witness of a heart that condemned him not, as
his eye, bedewed with love, rested, too, with something of ancestral
pride, on the undimmed motto of the family—‘LOIAUTE.’”
The slightest matters have their vulgarity fumigated out of them by the
same elevated style. Commonplace people would say that a copy of
Shakespeare lay on a drawing-room table; but the authoress of “The
Enigma,” bent on edifying periphrasis, tells you that there lay on the
table, “that fund of human thought and feeling, which teaches the heart
through the little name, ‘Shakespeare.’” A watchman sees a light burning
in an upper window rather longer than usual, and thinks that people are
foolish to sit up late when they have an opportunity of going to bed;
but, lest this fact should seem too low and common, it is presented to us
in the following striking and metaphysical manner: “He marvelled—as a man
_will_ think for others in a necessarily separate personality,
consequently (though disallowing it) in false mental premise—how
differently _he_ should act, how gladly _he_ should prize the rest so
lightly held of within.” A footman—an ordinary Jeames, with large calves
and aspirated vowels—answers the door-bell, and the opportunity is seized
to tell you that he was a “type of the large class of pampered menials,
who follow the curse of Cain—‘vagabonds’ on the face of the earth, and
whose estimate of the human class varies in the graduated scale of money
and expenditure. . . . These, and such as these, O England, be the false
lights of thy morbid civilization!” We have heard of various “false
lights,” from Dr. Cumming to Robert Owen, from Dr. Pusey to the
Spirit-rappers, but we never before heard of the false light that
emanates from plush and powder.
In the same way very ordinary events of civilized life are exalted into
the most awful crises, and ladies in full skirts and _manches à la
Chinoise_, conduct themselves not unlike the heroines of sanguinary
melodramas. Mrs. Percy, a shallow woman of the world, wishes her son
Horace to marry the auburn-haired Grace, she being an heiress; but he,
after the manner of sons, falls in love with the raven-haired Kate, the
heiress’s portionless cousin; and, moreover, Grace herself shows every
symptom of perfect indifference to Horace. In such cases sons are often
sulky or fiery, mothers are alternately manœuvring and waspish, and the
portionless young lady often lies awake at night and cries a good deal.
We are getting used to these things now, just as we are used to eclipses
of the moon, which no longer set us howling and beating tin kettles. We
never heard of a lady in a fashionable “front” behaving like Mrs. Percy
under these circumstances. Happening one day to see Horace talking to
Grace at a window, without in the least knowing what they are talking
about, or having the least reason to believe that Grace, who is mistress
of the house and a person of dignity, would accept her son if he were to
offer himself, she suddenly rushes up to them and clasps them both,
saying, “with a flushed countenance and in an excited manner”—“This is
indeed happiness; for, may I not call you so, Grace?—my Grace—my Horace’s
Grace!—my dear children!” Her son tells her she is mistaken, and that he
is engaged to Kate, whereupon we have the following scene and tableau:
“Gathering herself up to an unprecedented height (!) her eyes
lightening forth the fire of her anger:
“‘Wretched boy!’ she said, hoarsely and scornfully, and clenching her
hand, ‘Take then the doom of your own choice! Bow down your
miserable head and let a mother’s—’
“‘Curse not!’ spake a deep low voice from behind, and Mrs. Percy
started, scared, as though she had seen a heavenly visitant appear,
to break upon her in the midst of her sin.
“Meantime Horace had fallen on his knees, at her feet, and hid his
face in his hands.
“Who then, is she—who! Truly his ‘guardian spirit’ hath stepped
between him and the fearful words, which, however unmerited, must
have hung as a pall over his future existence;—a spell which could
not be unbound—which could not be unsaid.
“Of an earthly paleness, but calm with the still, iron-bound calmness
of death—the only calm one there—Katherine stood; and her words smote
on the ear in tones whose appallingly slow and separate intonation
rung on the heart like a chill, isolated tolling of some fatal knell.
“‘He would have plighted me his faith, but I did not accept it; you
cannot, therefore—you _dare_ not curse him. And here,’ she
continued, raising her hand to heaven, whither her large dark eyes
also rose with a chastened glow, which, for the first time,
_suffering_ had lighted in those passionate orbs—‘here I promise,
come weal, come woe, that Horace Wolchorley and I do never
interchange vows without his mother’s sanction—without his mother’s
blessing!’”
Here, and throughout the story, we see that confusion of purpose which is
so characteristic of silly novels written by women. It is a story of
quite modern drawing-room society—a society in which polkas are played
and Puseyism discussed; yet we have characters, and incidents, and traits
of manner introduced, which are mere shreds from the most heterogeneous
romances. We have a blind Irish harper, “relic of the picturesque bards
of yore,” startling us at a Sunday-school festival of tea and cake in an
English village; we have a crazy gypsy, in a scarlet cloak, singing
snatches of romantic song, and revealing a secret on her death-bed which,
with the testimony of a dwarfish miserly merchant, who salutes strangers
with a curse and a devilish laugh, goes to prove that Ernest, the model
young clergyman, is Kate’s brother; and we have an ultra-virtuous Irish
Barney, discovering that a document is forged, by comparing the date of
the paper with the date of the alleged signature, although the same
document has passed through a court of law and occasioned a fatal
decision. The “Hall” in which Sir Lionel lives is the venerable
country-seat of an old family, and this, we suppose, sets the imagination
of the authoress flying to donjons and battlements, where “lo! the warder
blows his horn;” for, as the inhabitants are in their bedrooms on a night
certainly within the recollection of Pleaceman X. and a breeze springs
up, which we are at first told was faint, and then that it made the old
cedars bow their branches to the greensward, she falls into this mediæval
vein of description (the italics are ours): “The banner _unfurled it_ at
the sound, and shook its guardian wing above, while the startled owl
_flapped her_ in the ivy; the firmament looking down through her ‘argus
eyes’—
‘Ministers of heaven’s mute melodies.’
And lo! two strokes tolled from out the warder tower, and ‘Two o’clock’
re-echoed its interpreter below.”
Such stories as this of “The Enigma” remind us of the pictures clever
children sometimes draw “out of their own head,” where you will see a
modern villa on the right, two knights in helmets fighting in the
foreground, and a tiger grinning in a jungle on the left, the several
objects being brought together because the artist thinks each pretty, and
perhaps still more because he remembers seeing them in other pictures.
But we like the authoress much better on her mediæval stilts than on her
oracular ones—when she talks of the _Ich_ and of “subjective” and
“objective,” and lays down the exact line of Christian verity, between
“right-hand excesses and left-hand declensions.” Persons who deviate
from this line are introduced with a patronizing air of charity. Of a
certain Miss Inshquine she informs us, with all the lucidity of italics
and small caps, that “_function_, not _form_, AS _the inevitable outer
expression of the spirit in this tabernacle age_, weakly engrossed her.”
And _à propos_ of Miss Mayjar, an evangelical lady who is a little too
apt to talk of her visits to sick women and the state of their souls, we
are told that the model clergyman is “not one to disallow, through the
_super_ crust, the undercurrent toward good in the _subject_, or the
positive benefits, nevertheless, to the _object_.” We imagine the
double-refined accent and protrusion of chin which are feebly represented
by the italics in this lady’s sentences! We abstain from quoting any of
her oracular doctrinal passages, because they refer to matters too
serious for our pages just now.
The epithet “silly” may seem impertinent, applied to a novel which
indicates so much reading and intellectual activity as “The Enigma,” but
we use this epithet advisedly. If, as the world has long agreed, a very
great amount of instruction will not make a wise man, still less will a
very mediocre amount of instruction make a wise woman. And the most
mischievous form of feminine silliness is the literary form, because it
tends to confirm the popular prejudice against the more solid education
of women.
When men see girls wasting their time in consultations about bonnets and
ball dresses, and in giggling or sentimental love-confidences, or
middle-aged women mismanaging their children, and solacing themselves
with acrid gossip, they can hardly help saying, “For Heaven’s sake, let
girls be better educated; let them have some better objects of
thought—some more solid occupations.” But after a few hours’
conversation with an oracular literary woman, or a few hours’ reading of
her books, they are likely enough to say, “After all, when a woman gets
some knowledge, see what use she makes of it! Her knowledge remains
acquisition instead of passing into culture; instead of being subdued
into modesty and simplicity by a larger acquaintance with thought and
fact, she has a feverish consciousness of her attainments; she keeps a
sort of mental pocket-mirror, and is continually looking in it at her own
‘intellectuality;’ she spoils the taste of one’s muffin by questions of
metaphysics; ‘puts down’ men at a dinner-table with her superior
information; and seizes the opportunity of a _soirée_ to catechise us on
the vital question of the relation between mind and matter. And then,
look at her writings! She mistakes vagueness for depth, bombast for
eloquence, and affectation for originality; she struts on one page, rolls
her eyes on another, grimaces in a third, and is hysterical in a fourth.
She may have read many writings of great men, and a few writings of great
women; but she is as unable to discern the difference between her own
style and theirs as a Yorkshireman is to discern the difference between
his own English and a Londoner’s: rhodomontade is the native accent of
her intellect. No—the average nature of women is too shallow and feeble
a soil to bear much tillage; it is only fit for the very lightest crops.”
It is true that the men who come to such a decision on such very
superficial and imperfect observation may not be among the wisest in the
world; but we have not now to contest their opinion—we are only pointing
out how it is unconsciously encouraged by many women who have volunteered
themselves as representatives of the feminine intellect. We do not
believe that a man was ever strengthened in such an opinion by
associating with a woman of true culture, whose mind had absorbed her
knowledge instead of being absorbed by it. A really cultured woman, like
a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her
knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinions in something like
just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she flatters
herself that she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes it
a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself.
She neither spouts poetry nor quotes Cicero on slight provocation; not
because she thinks that a sacrifice must be made to the prejudices of
men, but because that mode of exhibiting her memory and Latinity does not
present itself to her as edifying or graceful. She does not write books
to confound philosophers, perhaps because she is able to write books that
delight them. In conversation she is the least formidable of women,
because she understands you, without wanting to make you aware that you
_can’t_ understand her. She does not give you information, which is the
raw material of culture—she gives you sympathy, which is its subtlest
essence.
A more numerous class of silly novels than the oracular (which are
generally inspired by some form of High Church or transcendental
Christianity) is what we may call the _white neck-cloth_ species, which
represent the tone of thought and feeling in the Evangelical party. This
species is a kind of genteel tract on a large scale, intended as a sort
of medicinal sweetmeat for Low Church young ladies; an Evangelical
substitute for the fashionable novel, as the May Meetings are a
substitute for the Opera. Even Quaker children, one would think, can
hardly have been denied the indulgence of a doll; but it must be a doll
dressed in a drab gown and a coal-scuttle-bonnet—not a worldly doll, in
gauze and spangles. And there are no young ladies, we imagine—unless
they belong to the Church of the United Brethren, in which people are
married without any love-making—who can dispense with love stories.
Thus, for Evangelical young ladies there are Evangelical love stories, in
which the vicissitudes of the tender passion are sanctified by saving
views of Regeneration and the Atonement. These novels differ from the
oracular ones, as a Low Churchwoman often differs from a High
Churchwoman: they are a little less supercilious and a great deal more
ignorant, a little less correct in their syntax and a great deal more
vulgar.
The Orlando of Evangelical literature is the young curate, looked at from
the point of view of the middle class, where cambric bands are understood
to have as thrilling an effect on the hearts of young ladies as
epaulettes have in the classes above and below it. In the ordinary type
of these novels the hero is almost sure to be a young curate, frowned
upon, perhaps by worldly mammas, but carrying captive the hearts of their
daughters, who can “never forget _that_ sermon;” tender glances are
seized from the pulpit stairs instead of the opera-box; _tête-à-têtes_
are seasoned with quotations from Scripture instead of quotations from
the poets; and questions as to the state of the heroine’s affections are
mingled with anxieties as to the state of her soul. The young curate
always has a background of well-dressed and wealthy if not fashionable
society—for Evangelical silliness is as snobbish as any other kind of
silliness—and the Evangelical lady novelist, while she explains to you
the type of the scapegoat on one page, is ambitious on another to
represent the manners and conversations of aristocratic people. Her
pictures of fashionable society are often curious studies, considered as
efforts of the Evangelical imagination; but in one particular the novels
of the White Neck-cloth School are meritoriously realistic—their favorite
hero, the Evangelical young curate, is always rather an insipid
personage.
The most recent novel of this species that we happen to have before us is
“The Old Grey Church.” It is utterly tame and feeble; there is no one
set of objects on which the writer seems to have a stronger grasp than on
any other; and we should be entirely at a loss to conjecture among what
phases of life her experience has been gained, but for certain vulgarisms
of style which sufficiently indicate that she has had the advantage,
though she has been unable to use it, of mingling chiefly with men and
women whose manners and characters have not had all their bosses and
angles rubbed down by refined conventionalism. It is less excusable in
an Evangelical novelist than in any other, gratuitously to seek her
subjects among titles and carriages. The real drama of
Evangelicalism—and it has abundance of fine drama for any one who has
genius enough to discern and reproduce it—lies among the middle and lower
classes; and are not Evangelical opinions understood to give an especial
interest in the weak things of the earth, rather than in the mighty?
Why, then, cannot our Evangelical lady novelists show us the operation of
their religious views among people (there really are many such in the
world) who keep no carriage, “not so much as a brass-bound gig,” who even
manage to eat their dinner without a silver fork, and in whose mouths the
authoress’s questionable English would be strictly consistent? Why can
we not have pictures of religious life among the industrial classes in
England, as interesting as Mrs. Stowe’s pictures of religious life among
the negroes? Instead of this pious ladies nauseate us with novels which
remind us of what we sometimes see in a worldly woman recently
“converted;”—she is as fond of a fine dinner-table as before, but she
invites clergymen instead of beaux; she thinks as much of her dress as
before, but she adopts a more sober choice of colors and patterns; her
conversation is as trivial as before, but the triviality is flavored with
gospel instead of gossip. In “The Old Grey Church” we have the same sort
of Evangelical travesty of the fashionable novel, and of course the
vicious, intriguing baronet is not wanting. It is worth while to give a
sample of the style of conversation attributed to this high-born rake—a
style that, in its profuse italics and palpable innuendoes, is worthy of
Miss Squeers. In an evening visit to the ruins of the Colosseum,
Eustace, the young clergyman, has been withdrawing the heroine, Miss
Lushington, from the rest of the party, for the sake of a _tête-à-tête_.
The baronet is jealous, and vents his pique in this way:
“There they are, and Miss Lushington, no doubt, quite safe; for she
is under the holy guidance of Pope Eustace the First, who has, of
course, been delivering to her an edifying homily on the wickedness
of the heathens of yore, who, as tradition tells us, in this very
place let loose the wild _beastises_ on poor St. Paul!—Oh, no! by the
bye, I believe I am wrong, and betraying my want of clergy, and that
it was not at all St. Paul, nor was it here. But no matter, it would
equally serve as a text to preach from, and from which to diverge to
the degenerate _heathen_ Christians of the present day, and all their
naughty practices, and so end with an exhortation to ‘come but from
among them, and be separate;’—and I am sure, Miss Lushington, you
have most scrupulously conformed to that injunction this evening, for
we have seen nothing of you since our arrival. But every one seems
agreed it has been a _charming party of pleasure_, and I am sure we
all feel _much indebted_ to Mr. Gray for having _suggested_ it; and
as he seems so capital a cicerone, I hope he will think of something
else equally agreeable to _all_.”
This drivelling kind of dialogue, and equally drivelling narrative,
which, like a bad drawing, represents nothing, and barely indicates what
is meant to be represented, runs through the book; and we have no doubt
is considered by the amiable authoress to constitute an improving novel,
which Christian mothers will do well to put into the hands of their
daughters. But everything is relative; we have met with American
vegetarians whose normal diet was dry meal, and who, when their appetite
wanted stimulating, tickled it with _wet_ meal; and so, we can imagine
that there are Evangelical circles in which “The Old Grey Church” is
devoured as a powerful and interesting fiction.
But perhaps the least readable of silly women’s novels are the
_modern-antique_ species, which unfold to us the domestic life of Jannes
and Jambres, the private love affairs of Sennacherib, or the mental
struggles and ultimate conversion of Demetrius the silversmith. From
most silly novels we can at least extract a laugh; but those of the
modern-antique school have a ponderous, a leaden kind of fatuity, under
which we groan. What can be more demonstrative of the inability of
literary women to measure their own powers than their frequent assumption
of a task which can only be justified by the rarest concurrence of
acquirement with genius? The finest effort to reanimate the past is of
course only approximative—is always more or less an infusion of the
modern spirit into the ancient form—
Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst,
Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist,
In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln.
Admitting that genius which has familiarized itself with all the relics
of an ancient period can sometimes, by the force of its sympathetic
divination, restore the missing notes in the “music of humanity,” and
reconstruct the fragments into a whole which will really bring the remote
past nearer to us, and interpret it to our duller apprehension—this form
of imaginative power must always be among the very rarest, because it
demands as much accurate and minute knowledge as creative vigor. Yet we
find ladies constantly choosing to make their mental mediocrity more
conspicuous by clothing it in a masquerade of ancient names; by putting
their feeble sentimentality into the mouths of Roman vestals or Egyptian
princesses, and attributing their rhetorical arguments to Jewish
high-priests and Greek philosophers. A recent example of this heavy
imbecility is “Adonijah, a Tale of the Jewish Dispersion,” which forms
part of a series, “uniting,” we are told, “taste, humor, and sound
principles.” “Adonijah,” we presume, exemplifies the tale of “sound
principles;” the taste and humor are to be found in other members of the
series. We are told on the cover that the incidents of this tale are
“fraught with unusual interest,” and the preface winds up thus: “To those
who feel interested in the dispersed of Israel and Judea, these pages may
afford, perhaps, information on an important subject, as well as
amusement.” Since the “important subject” on which this book is to
afford information is not specified, it may possibly lie in some esoteric
meaning to which we have no key; but if it has relation to the dispersed
of Israel and Judea at any period of their history, we believe a
tolerably well-informed school-girl already knows much more of it than
she will find in this “Tale of the Jewish Dispersion.” “Adonijah” is
simply the feeblest kind of love story, supposed to be instructive, we
presume, because the hero is a Jewish captive and the heroine a Roman
vestal; because they and their friends are converted to Christianity
after the shortest and easiest method approved by the “Society for
Promoting the Conversion of the Jews;” and because, instead of being
written in plain language, it is adorned with that peculiar style of
grandiloquence which is held by some lady novelists to give an antique
coloring, and which we recognize at once in such phrases as these:—“the
splendid regnal talent, undoubtedly, possessed by the Emperor Nero”—“the
expiring scion of a lofty stem”—“the virtuous partner of his couch”—“ah,
by Vesta!”—and “I tell thee, Roman.” Among the quotations which serve at
once for instruction and ornament on the cover of this volume, there is
one from Miss Sinclair, which informs us that “Works of imagination are
_avowedly_ read by men of science, wisdom, and piety;” from which we
suppose the reader is to gather the cheering inference that Dr. Daubeny,
Mr. Mill, or Mr. Maurice may openly indulge himself with the perusal of
“Adonijah,” without being obliged to secrete it among the sofa cushions,
or read it by snatches under the dinner-table.
* * * * *
“Be not a baker if your head be made of butter,” says a homely proverb,
which, being interpreted, may mean, let no woman rush into print who is
not prepared for the consequences. We are aware that our remarks are in
a very different tone from that of the reviewers who, with perennial
recurrence of precisely similar emotions, only paralleled, we imagine, in
the experience of monthly nurses, tell one lady novelist after another
that they “hail” her productions “with delight.” We are aware that the
ladies at whom our criticism is pointed are accustomed to be told, in the
choicest phraseology of puffery, that their pictures of life are
brilliant, their characters well drawn, their style fascinating, and
their sentiments lofty. But if they are inclined to resent our plainness
of speech, we ask them to reflect for a moment on the chary praise, and
often captious blame, which their panegyrists give to writers whose works
are on the way to become classics. No sooner does a woman show that she
has genius or effective talent, than she receives the tribute of being
moderately praised and severely criticised. By a peculiar thermometric
adjustment, when a woman’s talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is
at the boiling pitch; when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no
more than summer heat; and if ever she reaches excellence, critical
enthusiasm drops to the freezing point. Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell,
and Mrs. Gaskell have been treated as cavalierly as if they had been men.
And every critic who forms a high estimate of the share women may
ultimately take in literature, will on principle abstain from any
exceptional indulgence toward the productions of literary women. For it
must be plain to every one who looks impartially and extensively into
feminine literature that its greatest deficiencies are due hardly more to
the want of intellectual power than to the want of those moral qualities
that contribute to literary excellence—patient diligence, a sense of the
responsibility involved in publication, and an appreciation of the
sacredness of the writer’s art. In the majority of women’s books you see
that kind of facility which springs from the absence of any high
standard; that fertility in imbecile combination or feeble imitation
which a little self-criticism would check and reduce to barrenness; just
as with a total want of musical ear people will sing out of tune, while a
degree more melodic sensibility would suffice to render them silent. The
foolish vanity of wishing to appear in print, instead of being
counterbalanced by any consciousness of the intellectual or moral
derogation implied in futile authorship, seems to be encouraged by the
extremely false impression that to write _at all_ is a proof of
superiority in a woman. On this ground we believe that the average
intellect of women is unfairly represented by the mass of feminine
literature, and that while the few women who write well are very far
above the ordinary intellectual level of their sex, the many women who
write ill are very far below it. So that, after all, the severer critics
are fulfilling a chivalrous duty in depriving the mere fact of feminine
authorship of any false prestige which may give it a delusive attraction,
and in recommending women of mediocre faculties—as at least a negative
service they can render their sex—to abstain from writing.
The standing apology for women who become writers without any special
qualification is that society shuts them out from other spheres of
occupation. Society is a very culpable entity, and has to answer for the
manufacture of many unwholesome commodities, from bad pickles to bad
poetry. But society, like “matter,” and Her Majesty’s Government, and
other lofty abstractions, has its share of excessive blame as well as
excessive praise. Where there is one woman who writes from necessity, we
believe there are three women who write from vanity; and besides, there
is something so antispetic in the mere healthy fact of working for one’s
bread, that the most trashy and rotten kind of feminine literature is not
likely to have been produced under such circumstances. “In all labor
there is profit;” but ladies’ silly novels, we imagine, are less the
result of labor than of busy idleness.
Happily, we are not dependent on argument to prove that Fiction is a
department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully
equal men. A cluster of great names, both living and dead, rush to our
memories in evidence that women can produce novels not only fine, but
among the very finest—novels, too, that have a precious speciality, lying
quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience. No educational
restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there
is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements. Like
crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful; we have
only to pour in the right elements—genuine observation, humor, and
passion. But it is precisely this absence of rigid requirement which
constitutes the fatal seduction of novel-writing to incompetent women.
Ladies are not wont to be very grossly deceived as to their power of
playing on the piano; here certain positive difficulties of execution
have to be conquered, and incompetence inevitably breaks down. Every art
which had its absolute _technique_ is, to a certain extent, guarded from
the intrusions of mere left-handed imbecility. But in novel-writing
there are no barriers for incapacity to stumble against, no external
criteria to prevent a writer from mistaking foolish facility for mastery.
And so we have again and again the old story of La Fontaine’s ass, who
pats his nose to the flute, and, finding that he elicits some sound,
exclaims, “Moi, aussie, je joue de la flute”—a fable which we commend, at
parting, to the consideration of any feminine reader who is in danger of
adding to the number of “silly novels by lady novelists.”