The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

ever strengthened in such an opinion by associating with a woman of true

culture, whose mind had absorbed her knowledge instead of being absorbed

by it. A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler

and the less obtrusive for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her

opinions in something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal

from which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men

and things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right

estimate of herself. She neither spouts poetry nor quotes Cicero6 on slight

provocation; not because she thinks that a sacrifice must be made to the prej

udices of men, but because that mode of exhibiting her memory and Latinity

does not present itself to her as edifying or graceful. She does not write books

to confound philosophers, perhaps because she is able to write books that

delight them. In conversation she is the least formidable of women, because

she understands you, without wanting to make you aware that you can't under

stand her. She does not give you information, which is the raw material of

culture,�she gives you sympathy, which is its subtlest essence. A more numerous class of silly novels than the oracular, (which are generally

inspired by some form of High Church, or transcendental Christianity,) is

what we may call the white neck-cloth species, which represent the tone of

thought and feeling in the Evangelical party. This species is a kind of genteel

tract on a large scale, intended as a sort of medicinal sweetmeat for Low

Church young ladies; an Evangelical substitute for the fashionable novel, as

5. Inflated diction. It is assumed a Yorkshireman of a Londoner. cannot discern the difference between his north-6. Roman statesman and orator (106�43 B.C.E.), ern dialect and the putatively more refined speech and a staple of Latin instruction for centuries.

 .

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS / 134 7

the May Meetings7 are a substitute for the Opera. Even Quaker children, one

would think, can hardly have been denied the indulgence of a doll; but it must

be a doll dressed in a drab gown and a coal-scuttle bonnet�not a worldly doll,

in gauze and spangles. And there are no young ladies, we imagine,�unless

they belong to the Church of the United Brethren, in which people are married

without any love-making8�who can dispense with love stories. Thus, for

Evangelical young ladies there are Evangelical love stories, in which the vicis

situdes of the tender passion are sanctified by saving views of Regeneration

and the Atonement. These novels differ from the oracular ones, as a Low

Churchwoman often differs from a High Churchwoman: they are a little less

supercilious, and a great deal more ignorant, a little less correct in their syntax, and a great deal more vulgar.9 The Orlando1 of Evangelical literature is the young curate, looked at from

the point of view of the middle class, where cambric bands are understood to

have as thrilling an effect on the hearts of young ladies as epaulettes2 have in

the classes above and below it. In the ordinary type of these novels, the hero

is almost sure to be a young curate, frowned upon, perhaps, by worldly mam

mas, but carrying captive the hearts of their daughters, who can "never forget

that sermon;" tender glances are seized from the pulpit stairs instead of the

opera-box; tete-a-tetes are seasoned with quotations from Scripture, instead of

quotations from the poets; and questions as to the state of the heroine's affec

tions are mingled with anxieties as to the state of her soul. The young curate

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