The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

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.

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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,

and often captious blame, which their panegyrists give to writers whose works

are on the way to become classics. No sooner does a woman show that she

has genius or effective talent, than she receives the tribute of being moderately

praised and severely criticised. By a peculiar thermometric adjustment, when

a woman's talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch;

when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than summer heat; and

if ever she reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point.

Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell, and Mrs. Gaskell6 have been treated as cav

alierly as if they had been men. And every critic who forms a high estimate of

the share women may ultimately take in literature, will, on principle, abstain

from any exceptional indulgence towards the productions of literary women.

For it must be plain to every one who looks impartially and extensively into

feminine literature, that its greatest deficiencies are due hardly more to the

want of intellectual power than to the want of those moral qualities that con

tribute to literary excellence�patient diligence, a sense of the responsibility

involved in publication, and an appreciation of the sacredness of the writer's

art. In the majority of women's books you see that kind of facility which springs

from the absence of any high standard; that fertility in imbecile combination

or feeble imitation which a little self-criticism would check and reduce to

barrenness; just as with a total want of musical ear people will sing out of

4. What they eal! the spirit of the age / is at the women writers of the 19th century; Martineau base the gentlemen's own spirit, /in which the ages (1802�1876), a prolific author in a range of non- are reflected (German; Goethe's Faust I [1808], fiction genres; Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Naclit, lines 577-79). novelist (first published under the pseudonym 5. Women hired to look after mothers and babies Bell); and Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), novel- in the first month after childbirth. ist. 6. Eliot names three of the foremost British

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SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS / 1349

tune, while a degree more melodic sensibility would suffice to render them

silent. The foolish vanity of wishing to appear in print, instead of being coun

terbalanced by any consciousness of the intellectual or moral derogation

implied in futile authorship, seems to be encouraged by the extremely false