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 'lady-like' 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 hero
ism,?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 irreproach
able; 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; Belgravia5 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
2. Bewitched. year': at this date an annual income of .500 would 3. Bad (French). support a modest middle- class household with one 4. Abundant. or two servants. 5. A wealthy district of London. 'Five hundred a
.
1344 / GEORGE ELIOT
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.
$ $ #
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:6 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 Scotia7 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, how
ever 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 clamour and pretension
