are the people who, privately as well as publicly, govern the nation.
By dull people, I mean people of all degrees of rank and education,
who never want to be amused. I don't know how long it is since these
dreary members of the population first hit on the cunning idea of
calling themselves Respectable; but I do know that, ever since that
time, this great nation has been afraid of them--afraid in religious,
in political, and in social matters. If my present business were with
the general question, I think I could prove this assertion by simple
reference to those records of our national proceedings which appear in
the daily newspapers. But my object in writing is of the particular
kind. I have a special petition to address to the writers of novels,
on the part of the Disreputable Society to which I belong; and if I am
to give any example here of the supremacy of the dull people, it must
be drawn from one or two plain evidences of their success in opposing
the claims of our fictitious literature to popular recognition.
The dull people decided years and years ago, as every one knows, that
novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that
novel-reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time. They
gave, and still give, reasons for this opinion, which are very
satisfactory to persons born without Fancy or Imagination, and which
are utterly inconclusive to everyone else. But, with reason or without
it, the dull people have succeeded in affixing to our novels the
stigma of being a species of contraband goods. Look, for example, at
the Prospectus of any librarian. The principal part of his trade of
book-lending consists in the distributing of novels; and he is
uniformly ashamed to own that simple fact. Sometimes, he is afraid to
print the word Novel at all in his lists, and smuggles in his
contraband fiction under the head of Miscellaneous Literature.
Sometimes, after freely offering all histories, all biographies, all
voyages, all travels, he owns self-reproachfully to the fact of having
novels too, but deprecatingly adds--Only the best! As if no other
branch of the great tree of literature ever produced tasteless and
worthless fruit! In all cases, he puts novels last on his public list
of the books he distributes, though they stand first on his private
list of the books he gains by. Why is he guilty of all these sins
against candour? Because he is afraid of the dull people.
Look again--and this brings me to the subject of these lines--at our
Book Clubs. How paramount are the dull people there! How they hug to
their rigid bosoms Voyages and Travels! How they turn their intolerant
backs on novels! How resolutely they get together, in a packed body,
on the committee, and impose their joyless laws on the yielding
victims of the club, who secretly want to be amused! Our book club was
an example of the unresisted despotism of their rule. We began with a
law that novels should be occasionally admitted; and the dull people
abrogated it before we had been in existence a twelvemonth. I
smuggled in the last morsel of fiction that our starving stomachs were
allowed to consume, and produced a hurricane of virtuous indignation
at the next meeting of the committee.
All the dull people of both sexes attended that meeting. One dull
gentleman said the author was a pantheist, and quoted some florid
ecstacies on the subject of scenery and flowers in support of the
opinion. Nobody seemed to know exactly what a pantheist was, but
everybody cried "Hear, hear,"--which did just as well for the purpose.
Another dull gentleman said the book was painful because there was a
death-bed scene in it. A third reviled it for morbid revelling in the
subject of crime, because a shot from the pistol of a handsome
highwayman dispatched the villain of the story. But the great effect
of the day was produced by a lady, the mother of a large family which
began with a daughter of eighteen years, and ended with a boy of eight
months. This lady's objection affected the heroine of the novel,--a
respectable married woman, perpetually plunged in virtuous suffering,
but an improper character for young persons to read about, because the
poor thing had two accouchements--only two!--in the course of three
volumes. "How can I suffer my daughters to read such a book as that?"
cried our prolific subscriber indignantly. A tumult of applause
followed. A chorus of speeches succeeded, full of fierce references
to "our national morality," and "the purity of our hearths and homes."
A resolution was passed excluding all novels for the future; and then,
at last, the dull people held their tongues, and sat down with a thump
in their chairs, and glared contentedly on each other in stolid
controversial triumph.
From that time forth (histories and biographies being comparatively
scarce articles), we were fed by the dull people on nothing but
Voyages and Travels. Every man (or woman) who had voyaged and
travelled to no purpose, who had made no striking observations of any
kind, who had nothing whatever to say, and who said it at great length
in large type on thick paper, with accompaniment of frowsy
lithographic illustrations, was introduced weekly to our hearths and
homes as the most valuable guide, philosopher, and friend whom our
rulers could possibly send us. All the subscribers submitted; all
partook the national dread of the dull people, with the exception of
myself and the members of my family enumerated at the beginning of
these pages. We resolutely abandoned the club; got a box-full of
novels for ourselves, once a month, from London; lost caste with our
respectable friends in consequence; and became, for the future,
throughout the length and breadth of our neighbourhood, the
Disreputable Society to which I have already alluded. If the dull
people of our district were told to-morrow that my wife, daughters,
and nieces had all eloped in different directions, leaving just one
point of the compass open as a runaway outlet for me and the cook, I
feel firmly persuaded that not one of them would be inclined to
discredit the report. "This is what comes of novel-reading!" they
would say--and would return, with renewed zest, to their Voyages and
Travels, their accouchements in real life, their canting "national
morality," and their blustering "purity of our hearths and homes."
And now, to come to the main object of this paper,--the humble
petition of myself and family to certain of our novel-writers. We may
say of ourselves that we deserve to be heard, for we have braved
public opinion for the sake of reading novels; and we have read, for
some years past, all (I hold to the assertion, incredible as it may
appear)--all the stories in one, two, and three volumes, that have
issued from the press. What, then, have we got to petition about? A
very slight matter. Marking, first of all, as exceptions, certain
singular instances of originality, I may mention, as a rule, that our
novel-reading enjoyments have hitherto been always derived from the
same sort of characters and the same sort of stories--varied, indeed,
as to names and minor events, but fundamentally always the same,
through hundreds on hundreds of successive volumes, by hundreds on
hundreds of different authors. We, none of us complain of this, so
far; for we like to have as much as possible of any good thing; but we
beg deferentially to inquire whether it might not be practicable to
give us a little variety for the future. We have no unwholesome
craving after absolute novelty--all that we venture to ask for is, the
ringing of a slight change on some of the favourite old tunes which we
have long since learnt by heart.
To begin with our favourite Hero. He is such an old friend that we
have by this time got to love him dearly. We would not lose sight of
him altogether on any consideration whatever. Far be it from us to
hint at the withdrawal of this noble, loving, injured, fascinating
man! We adore his aquiline nose, his tall form, his wavy hair, his
rich voice. Long may we continue to weep on his deep chest and press
respectfully to our lips the folds of his ample cloak! Personally
speaking it is by no means of him that we are getting tired, but of
certain actions which we think he has now performed often enough.
For instance, may we put it respectfully to the ladies and gentlemen
who are so good as to exhibit him, that he had better not "stride" any
more? He has stridden so much, on so many different occasions, across
so many halls, along so many avenues, in and out at so many
drawing-room doors, that he must be knocked up by this time, and his
dear legs ought really to have a little rest. Again, when his dignity
is injured by irreverent looks or words, can he not be made to assert
it for the future without "drawing himself up to his full height?" He
has really been stretched too much by perpetual indulgence in this
exercise for scores and scores of years. Let him sit down--do please
let him sit down next time! It would be quite new, and so impressive.
Then, again, we have so often discovered him standing with folded
arms, so often beheld him pacing with folded arms, so often heard him
soliloquise with folded arms, so often broken in upon him meditating
with folded arms, that we think he had better do something else with
his arms for the future. Could he swing them for a change? or put them
akimbo? or drop them suddenly on either side of him? Or could he give
them a holiday altogether, and fold his legs by way of variety?
Perhaps not. The word Legs--why, I cannot imagine--seems always
suggestive of jocularity. "Fitzherbert stood up and folded his arms,"
is serious. "Fitzherbert sat down and folded his legs," is comic. Why,
I should like to know?
A word--one respectful word of remonstrance to the lady-novelists
especially. We think they have put our Hero on horseback often enough.
For the first five hundred novels or so, it was grand, it was
thrilling, when he threw himself into the saddle after the inevitable
quarrel with his lady-love, and galloped off madly to his bachelor
home. It was inexpressibly soothing to behold him in the milder
passages of his career, moody in the saddle, with the reins thrown
loosely over the arched neck of his steed, as the gallant animal paced
softly with his noble burden, along a winding road, under a blue sky,
on a balmy afternoon in early spring. All this was delightful reading
for a certain number of years; but everything wears out at last, and
trust me, ladies, your hero's favourite steed, your dear, intelligent,
affectionate, glossy, long-tailed horse, has really done his work, and
may now be turned loose, for some time to come, with great advantage
to yourselves, and your readers.
Having spoken a word to the ladies, I am necessarily and tenderly
reminded of their charming representatives--the Heroines. Let me say
something, first, about our favourite two sisters--the tall dark one,
who is serious and unfortunate: the short light one, who is coquettish
and happy.
Being an Englishman, I have, of course, an ardent attachment to
anything like an established rule, simply because it is established. I
know that it is a rule that, when two sisters are presented in a
novel, one must be tall and dark, and the other short and light. I
know that five-feet-eight of female flesh and blood, when accompanied
by an olive complexion, black eyes, and raven hair, is synonymous with
strong passions and an unfortunate destiny. I know that five feet
nothing, golden ringlets, soft blue eyes, and a lily-brow, cannot
possibly be associated by any well-constituted novelist, with anything
but ringing laughter, arch innocence, and final matrimonial happiness.
I have studied these great first principles of the art of fiction too
long not to reverence them as established laws; but I venture
respectfully to suggest that the time has arrived when it is no longer
necessary to insist on them in novel after novel. I am afraid there is
something naturally revolutionary in the heart of man. Although I know
it to be against all precedent, I want to revolutionise our favourite
two sisters. Would any bold innovator run all risks, and make them
both alike in complexion and in stature? Or would any desperate man (I
dare not suggest such a course to the ladies) effect an entire
alteration, by making the two sisters change characters? I tremble
when I see to what lengths the spirit of innovation is leading me.
Would the public accept the tall dark-haired sister, if she exhibited
a jolly disposition and a tendency to be flippant in her talk? Would
readers be fatally startled out of their sense of propriety, if the
short charmer with the golden hair, appeared before them as a serious,
strong-minded, fierce-spoken, miserable, guilty woman? It might be a
dangerous experiment to make this change; but it would be worth
trying--the rather (if I may be allowed to mention anything so utterly
irrelevant to the subject under discussion as real life) because I
think there is some warrant in nature for attempting the proposed
innovation. Judging by my own small experience, I should say that
strong minds and passionate natures reside principally in the breasts
of little, light women, especially if they have angelic blue eyes and
a quantity of fair ringlets. The most facetiously skittish woman, for
her age, with whom I am acquainted, is my own wife, who is three
inches taller than I am. The heartiest laugher I ever heard is my
second daughter, who is bigger even than my wife, and has the blackest
eyebrows and the swarthiest cheeks in the whole neighbourhood. With
such instances as these, producible from the bosom of my own family,
who can wonder if I want, for once in a way, to overthrow the
established order of things, and have a jovial dark sister and a
dismal light one introduced as startling novelties in some few of the
hundred new volumes which we are likely to receive next season from
the Circulating Library?
But, after all, our long-established two sisters seem to be
exceptional beings, and to possess comparatively small importance, the
moment our minds revert to that vastly superior single personage, THE
HEROINE.
Let me mention, to begin with, that we wish no change to be made in
our respectable, recognised, old-fashioned Heroine, who has lived and
loved and wept for centuries. I have taken her to my bosom thousands
of times already, and ask nothing better than to indulge in that
tender luxury thousands of times again. I love her blushing cheek, her
gracefully-rounded form, her chiselled nose, her slender waist, her
luxuriant tresses which always escape from the fillet that binds them.
Any man or woman who attempts, from a diseased craving after novelty,
to cheat me out of one of her moonlight walks, one of her floods of
tears, one of her kneeling entreaties to obdurate relatives, one of
her rapturous sinkings on her lover's bosom, is a novelist whom I
distrust and dislike. He, or she, may be a very remarkable writer; but
their books will not do for my family and myself. The Heroine, the
whole Heroine, and nothing but the Heroine--that is our cry, if you
drive us into a corner and insist on our stating precisely what we
want, in the plainest terms possible.
Being thus faithfully attached to the established Heroine, it will
not, I trust, appear a very unaccountable proceeding, if we now
protest positively, and even indignantly, against her modern
successor--a bouncing, ill-conditioned, impudent young woman, who has
been introduced among us of late years. I venture to call this
wretched and futile substitute for our dear, tender, gentle, loving
old Heroine, the Man-Hater; because, in every book in which she
appears, it is her mission from first to last to behave as badly as
possible to every man with whom she comes in contact. She enters on
the scene with a preconceived prejudice against my sex, for which I,
as a man, abominate her; for which my wife, my daughters, my nieces,
and all other available women whom I have consulted on the subject,
despise her. When her lover makes her an offer of marriage, she
receives it in the light of a personal insult, goes up to her room
immediately afterwards, and flies into a passion with herself, because
she is really in love with the man all the time--comes down again, and
snubs him before company instead of making a decent apology--pouts and
flouts at him, on all after-occasions, until the end of the book is at
hand--then suddenly turns round and marries him! If we feel inclined
to ask why she could not, under the circumstances, receive his
advances with decent civility at first, we are informed that her
"maidenly consciousness" prevented it. This maidenly consciousness
seems to me very like new English for our old-fashioned phrase, bad
manners. And I am the more confirmed in this idea, because, on all
minor occasions, the Man-Hater is persistently rude and disobliging to
the last. Every individual in the novel who wears trousers and gets
within range of her maidenly consciousness, becomes her natural enemy
from that moment. If he makes a remark on the weather, her lip curls;
if he asks leave to give her a potato at dinner-time (meaning, poor
soul, to pick out for her the mealiest in the dish), her neck curves
in scorn; if he offers a compliment, finding she won't have a potato,
her nostril dilates. Whatever she does, even in her least aggressive
moments, she always gets the better of all the men. They are set up
like nine-pins for the Man-Hater to knock down. They are described, on
their introduction, as clever, resolute fellows; but they lose their
wits and their self-possession the instant they come within hail of
the Man-Hater's terrible tongue. No man kisses her, no man dries her
tears, no man sees her blush (except with rage), all through the three
volumes. And this is the opposition Heroine who is set up as successor
to our soft, feminine, loveable, sensitive darling of former days!
Set up, too, by lady-novelists, who ought surely to be authorities
when female characters are concerned. Is the Man-Hater a true
representative of young women, now-a-days? If so, what is to become of
my son--my unlucky son, aged twelve years?
In a short time, this boy will be marriageable, and he will go into
the world to bill and coo, and offer his hand and heart, as his father
did before him. My unhappy offspring, what a prospect awaits you! One
forbidding phalanx of Man-Haters, bristling with woman's dignity, and
armed to the teeth with maidenly consciousness, occupies the wide
matrimonial field, look where you will! Ill-fated youth, yet a few
years, and the female neck will curve, the female nostril dilate, at
the sight of you. You see that stately form, those rustling skirts,
that ample brow, and fall on your knees before it, and make your
proposal with the impassioned imbecility which your father exhibited
before you. My deluded boy, that is not a woman--it is a Man-Hater--a
whited sepulchre full of violent expostulations and injurious
epithets. She will lead you the life of a costermonger's ass, until
she has exhausted her whole stock of maidenly consciousness; and she
will then say (in effect, if not in words):--"Inferior animal, I loved
you from the first--I have asserted my dignity by making a fool of you
in public and private--now you may marry me!" Marry her not, my son!
Go rather to the slave-market at Constantinople--buy a Circassian
wife, who has heard nothing and read nothing about man-haters--bring
her home (with no better dowry than pots of the famous Cream from her
native land to propitiate your mother and sisters)--and trust to your
father to welcome an Asiatic daughter-in-law, who will not despise him
for the unavoidable misfortune of being a Man!
But I am losing my temper over a hypothetical case. I am forgetting
the special purpose of my petition, which is to beg that the Man-Hater
may be removed altogether from her usurped position of heroine. The
new-fashioned heroine is a libel on her sex. As a husband and a
father, I solemnly deny that she is in any single respect a natural
woman. Am I no judge? I have a wife, and I made her an offer. Did she
receive it as the Man-Haters receive offers? Can I ever forget the
mixture of modest confusion and perfect politeness with which that
admirable woman heard me utter the most absolute nonsense that ever
issued from my lips? Perhaps she is not fit for a heroine. Well, I can
give her up in that capacity without a pang. But my daughters and
nieces have claims, I suppose, to be considered as examples of what
young ladies are in the present day. Ever since I read the first novel
with a Man-Hater in it, I have had my eye on their nostrils, and I can
make affidavit that I have never yet seen them dilate under any
circumstances, or in any society. As for curling their lips and
curving their necks, they have attempted both operations at my express
request, and have found them to be physical impossibilities. In men's
society, their manners (like those of all other girls whom I meet
with) are natural and modest; and--in the cases of certain privileged
men--winning, into the bargain. They open their eyes with astonishment
when they read of the proceedings of our new-fashioned heroines, and
throw the book indignantly across the room, when they find a nice man
submitting to be bullied by a nasty woman, because he has paid her the
compliment of falling in love with her. No, no! we positively decline
to receive any more Man-Haters, and there is an end of it!
With this uncompromising expression of opinion, I think it desirable
to bring the present petition to a close. There are one or two other
good things in fiction, of which we have had enough; but I refrain
from mentioning them, from modest apprehension of asking for too much
at a time. If the slight changes in general, and the sweeping reform
in particular, which I have ventured to suggest, can be accomplished,
we are sure, in the future as in the past, to be grateful,
appreciating, and incessant novel-readers. If we cannot claim any
critical weight in the eyes of our esteemed authors, we can at least
arrogate to ourselves the minor merit, not only of reading novels
perpetually, but (and this is a rarer virtue) of publicly and proudly
avowing the fact. We only pretend to be human beings with a natural
desire for as much amusement as our work-a-day destinies will let us
have. We are just respectable enough to be convinced of the usefulness
of occasionally reading for information; but we are also certain (and
we say it boldly, in the teeth of the dull people), that there are few
higher, better, or more profitable enjoyments in this world than
reading a good novel.
FRAGMENTS OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.--I.
Laid up in lodgings.
MY PARIS LODGING.
It has happened rather whimsically, and not very fortunately for me,
that my first experience of living in furnished lodgings abroad, as
well as in England, has occurred at the very time when illness has
rendered me particularly susceptible to the temporary loss of the
comforts of home. I have been ill, alone, in furnished lodgings in
Paris--ill, alone, on the journey back to England--ill, alone, again,
in furnished lodgings in London. I am a single man; but as I have
already intimated, I never knew what it was to enjoy the desolate
liberty of the bachelor until I became an invalid. Some of my
impressions of things and persons about me, formed under these
anomalous circumstances, may, perhaps, prove not altogether unworthy
of being written down, while they are still fresh in my mind.