always has a background of well-dressed and wealthy, if not fashionable soci
ety;?for Evangelical silliness is as snobbish as any other kind of silliness; and
the Evangelical lady novelist, while she explains to you the type of the scape
goat on one page, is ambitious on another to represent the manners and con
versation of aristocratic people. Her pictures of fashionable society are often
curious studies considered as efforts of the Evangelical imagination; but in
one particular the novels of the White Neck-cloth School are meritoriously
realistic,?their favourite hero, the Evangelical young curate is always rather
an insipid personage. $ S 3 But, perhaps, the least readable of silly women's novels, are the modern-
antique species, which unfold to us the domestic life of Jannes and Jambres,
the private love affairs of Sennacherib, or the mental struggles and ultimate
conversion of Demetrius the silversmith.3 From most silly novels we can at
least extract a laugh; but those of the modern antique school have a ponderous,
a leaden kind of fatuity, under which we groan. What can be more demon
strative of the inability of literary women to measure their own powers, than
their frequent assumption of a task which can only be justified by the rarest
concurrence of acquirement with genius? The finest effort to reanimate the
past is of course only approximative?is always more or less an infusion of the
modern spirit into the ancient form,?
7. The Church of England's Missionary Society's 3. In Acts 19.24?27 the maker of statues of the annual spring meetings. On the High and Low Roman goddess Diana who denounces Paul for Church, see 'The Victorian Age' (p. 979). taking business away from him and his fellow 8. Courtship. craftsmen by converting people to Christianity. 9. Common. Jannes and Jambres were Egyptian magicians who 1. The romantic hero (in allusion to the hero of opposed Moses at Pharaoh's court (2 Timothy 3.8). Shakespeare's As You Like It). Sennacherib was an Assyrian king who ruled from 2. Attire characteristic of military men, as cambric 705 to 681 B.C.E. bands (white neck-clothes) are of the clergy.
.
1348 / GEORGE ELIOT
Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst,
Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist,
In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln.4 Admitting that genius which has familiarized itself with all the relics of an
ancient period can sometimes, by the force of its sympathetic divination,
restore the missing notes in the 'music of humanity,' and reconstruct the
fragments into a whole which will really bring the remote past nearer to us,
and interpret it to our duller apprehension,?this form of imaginative power
must always be among the very rarest, because it demands as much accurate
and minute knowledge as creative vigour. Yet we find ladies constantly choos
ing to make their mental mediocrity more conspicuous, by clothing it in a
masquerade of ancient names; by putting their feeble sentimentality into the
mouths of Roman vestals or Egyptian princesses, and attributing their rhetor
ical arguments to Jewish high-priests and Greek philosophers. * * *
'Be not a baker if your head be made of butter,' says a homely proverb,
which, being interpreted, may mean, let no woman rush into print who is not
prepared for the consequences. We are aware that our remarks are in a very
different tone from that of the reviewers who, with a perennial recurrence of
precisely similar emotions, only paralleled, we imagine, in the experience of
monthly nurses,5 tell one lady novelist after another that they 'hail' her pro
ductions 'with delight.' We are aware that the ladies at whom our criticism
is pointed are accustomed to be told, in the choicest phraseology of puffery,
that their pictures of life are brilliant, their characters well drawn, their style
fascinating, and their sentiments lofty. But if they are inclined to resent our
plainness of speech, we ask them to reflect for a moment on the chary praise,
