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, doubt
less, 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 tres vrai,8 emphasized by many notes of exclamation. The colloquial
style of these novels is often marked by much ingenious inversion, and a care
ful 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 neighbour that the first day she
read Shakspeare she 'stole away into the park, and beneath the shadow of the
greenwood tree, devoured with rapture the inspired page of the great magi
cian.' But the most remarkable efforts of the mind-and-millinery writers lie in
their philosophic reflections. The authoress of 'Laura Gay,'9 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,2 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.
6. A Javanese tree from which an arrow poison is 9. The 1856 novel Eliot has just satirized in the derived; here a figurative cliche meaning 'a poi-preceding section. sonous influence.' 1. Polyp. 7. Poetic cliches for England and Scotland, 2. An object of purely rational, as opposed to senrespectively. sual, perception (the latter being a phenomenon). 8. Very true (French).
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SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS / 134 5
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, phil
osophical, 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 smat
tering 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 the
ological questions,?who has any suspicion that she is not capable of discrim
inating 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 deplor
