ably 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,3 and ultra-Protestants, and to the perfect estab
lishment of that particular 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 elo
quence 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.
The epithet 'silly' may seem impertinent, applied to a novel which indicates
so much reading and intellectual activity as 'The Enigma;'4 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 sen
timental 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
3. Protestants who believed in the importance of was completely beyond human experience. liturgical sacraments (following Edward Pusey, 4. The 1856 novel Eliot has just satirized in the 1800-1882). 'Deists': Protestants who believed in preceding section. a personal God who created the universe but who
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1346 / GEORGE ELIOT
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 soiree to catechise us on the vital
question of the relation between mind and matter. And then, look at her writ
ings! She mistakes vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affecta
tion 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
