Herbert returned to us in March. The Young Lady was spending the winter
with us, and March, in spite of the calendar, turned out to be a winter
month. It usually is in New England, and April too, for that matter. And
I cannot say it is unfortunate for us. There are so many topics to be
turned over and settled at our fireside that a winter of ordinary length
would make little impression on the list. The fireside is, after all,
a sort of private court of chancery, where nothing ever does come to a
final decision. The chief effect of talk on any subject is to strengthen
one's own opinions, and, in fact, one never knows exactly what he does
believe until he is warmed into conviction by the heat of attack and
defence. A man left to himself drifts about like a boat on a calm lake;
it is only when the wind blows that the boat goes anywhere.
Herbert said he had been dipping into the recent novels written by
women, here and there, with a view to noting the effect upon literature
of this sudden and rather overwhelming accession to it. There was a good
deal of talk about it evening after evening, off and on, and I can only
undertake to set down fragments of it.
HERBERT. I should say that the distinguishing feature of the literature
of this day is the prominence women have in its production. They figure
in most of the magazines, though very rarely in the scholarly and
critical reviews, and in thousands of newspapers; to them we are
indebted for the oceans of Sunday-school books, and they write the
majority of the novels, the serial stories, and they mainly pour out the
watery flood of tales in the weekly papers. Whether this is to result in
more good than evil it is impossible yet to say, and perhaps it would be
unjust to say, until this generation has worked off its froth, and women
settle down to artistic, conscientious labor in literature.
THE MISTRESS. You don't mean to say that George Eliot, and Mrs. Gaskell,
and George Sand, and Mrs. Browning, before her marriage and severe
attack of spiritism, are less true to art than contemporary men
novelists and poets.
HERBERT. You name some exceptions that show the bright side of the
picture, not only for the present, but for the future. Perhaps genius
has no sex; but ordinary talent has. I refer to the great body of
novels, which you would know by internal evidence were written by women.
They are of two sorts: the domestic story, entirely unidealized, and as
flavorless as water-gruel; and the spiced novel, generally immoral in
tendency, in which the social problems are handled, unhappy marriages,
affinity and passional attraction, bigamy, and the violation of the
seventh commandment. These subjects are treated in the rawest manner,
without any settled ethics, with little discrimination of eternal right
and wrong, and with very little sense of responsibility for what is set
forth. Many of these novels are merely the blind outbursts of a nature
impatient of restraint and the conventionalities of society, and are as
chaotic as the untrained minds that produce them.
MANDEVILLE. Don't you think these novels fairly represent a social
condition of unrest and upheaval?
HERBERT. Very likely; and they help to create and spread abroad the
discontent they describe. Stories of bigamy (sometimes disguised by
divorce), of unhappy marriages, where the injured wife, through an
entire volume, is on the brink of falling into the arms of a sneaking
lover, until death kindly removes the obstacle, and the two souls, who
were born for each other, but got separated in the cradle, melt and
mingle into one in the last chapter, are not healthful reading for maids
or mothers.
THE MISTRESS. Or men.
THE FIRE-TENDER. The most disagreeable object to me in modern literature
is the man the women novelists have introduced as the leading character;
the women who come in contact with him seem to be fascinated by his
disdainful mien, his giant strength, and his brutal manner. He is broad
across the shoulders, heavily moulded, yet as lithe as a cat; has an
ugly scar across his right cheek; has been in the four quarters of the
globe; knows seventeen languages; had a harem in Turkey and a Fayaway in
the Marquesas; can be as polished as Bayard in the drawing-room, but is
as gloomy as Conrad in the library; has a terrible eye and a withering
glance, but can be instantly subdued by a woman's hand, if it is not
his wife's; and through all his morose and vicious career has carried a
heart as pure as a violet.
THE MISTRESS. Don't you think the Count of Monte Cristo is the elder
brother of Rochester?
THE FIRE-TENDER. One is a mere hero of romance; the other is meant for a
real man.
MANDEVILLE. I don't see that the men novel-writers are better than the
women.
HERBERT. That's not the question; but what are women who write so large
a proportion of the current stories bringing into literature? Aside
from the question of morals, and the absolutely demoralizing manner
of treating social questions, most of their stories are vapid and weak
beyond expression, and are slovenly in composition, showing neither
study, training, nor mental discipline.
THE MISTRESS. Considering that women have been shut out from the
training of the universities, and have few opportunities for the wide
observation that men enjoy, isn't it pretty well that the foremost
living writers of fiction are women?
HERBERT. You can say that for the moment, since Thackeray and Dickens
have just died. But it does not affect the general estimate. We
are inundated with a flood of weak writing. Take the Sunday-school
literature, largely the product of women; it has n't as much character
as a dried apple pie. I don't know what we are coming to if the presses
keep on running.
OUR NEXT DOOR. We are living, we are dwelling, in a grand and awful
time; I'm glad I don't write novels.
THE PARSON. So am I.
OUR NEXT DOOR. I tried a Sunday-school book once; but I made the good
boy end in the poorhouse, and the bad boy go to Congress; and the
publisher said it wouldn't do, the public wouldn't stand that sort of
thing. Nobody but the good go to Congress.
THE MISTRESS. Herbert, what do you think women are good for?
OUR NEXT DOOR. That's a poser.
HERBERT. Well, I think they are in a tentative state as to literature,
and we cannot yet tell what they will do. Some of our most brilliant
books of travel, correspondence, and writing on topics in which their
sympathies have warmly interested them, are by women. Some of them are
also strong writers in the daily journals.
MANDEVILLE. I 'm not sure there's anything a woman cannot do as well as
a man, if she sets her heart on it.
THE PARSON. That's because she's no conscience.
CHORUS. O Parson!
THE PARSON. Well, it does n't trouble her, if she wants to do anything.
She looks at the end, not the means. A woman, set on anything, will walk
right through the moral crockery without wincing. She'd be a great deal
more unscrupulous in politics than the average man. Did you ever see a
female lobbyist? Or a criminal? It is Lady Macbeth who does not falter.
Don't raise your hands at me! The sweetest angel or the coolest devil is
a woman. I see in some of the modern novels we have been talking of the
same unscrupulous daring, a blindness to moral distinctions, a constant
exaltation of a passion into a virtue, an entire disregard of the
immutable laws on which the family and society rest. And you ask lawyers
and trustees how scrupulous women are in business transactions!
THE FIRE-TENDER. Women are often ignorant of affairs, and, besides, they
may have a notion often that a woman ought to be privileged more than
a man in business matters; but I tell you, as a rule, that if men
would consult their wives, they would go a deal straighter in business
operations than they do go.
THE PARSON. We are all poor sinners. But I've another indictment against
the women writers. We get no good old-fashioned love-stories from them.
It's either a quarrel of discordant natures one a panther, and the other
a polar bear--for courtship, until one of them is crippled by a railway
accident; or a long wrangle of married life between two unpleasant
people, who can neither live comfortably together nor apart. I suppose,
by what I see, that sweet wooing, with all its torturing and delightful
uncertainty, still goes on in the world; and I have no doubt that the
majority of married people live more happily than the unmarried. But
it's easier to find a dodo than a new and good love-story.
MANDEVILLE. I suppose the old style of plot is exhausted. Everything in
man and outside of him has been turned over so often that I should think
the novelists would cease simply from want of material.
THE PARSON. Plots are no more exhausted than men are. Every man is a new
creation, and combinations are simply endless. Even if we did not have
new material in the daily change of society, and there were only a
fixed number of incidents and characters in life, invention could not be
exhausted on them. I amuse myself sometimes with my kaleidoscope, but
I can never reproduce a figure. No, no. I cannot say that you may not
exhaust everything else: we may get all the secrets of a nature into a
book by and by, but the novel is immortal, for it deals with men.
The Parson's vehemence came very near carrying him into a sermon; and
as nobody has the privilege of replying to his sermons, so none of the
circle made any reply now.
Our Next Door mumbled something about his hair standing on end, to hear
a minister defending the novel; but it did not interrupt the general
silence. Silence is unnoticed when people sit before a fire; it would be
intolerable if they sat and looked at each other.
The wind had risen during the evening, and Mandeville remarked, as they
rose to go, that it had a spring sound in it, but it was as cold as
winter. The Mistress said she heard a bird that morning singing in the
sun a spring song, it was a winter bird, but it sang.