The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

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

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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

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