| <Christian Remembrancer 1866 Vol 52>
| <Youth as depicted in Modern Fiction. 184-211>
| <ART. VII-1.The Lady's Mile by the Author of>
| <Lady Audley's Secret. London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler>
| <2. Miss Marjoribanks By the Author of  Salem Chapel>
| <London Blackwood>
| <pb n="184">
| An ideal which once seemed inseparable from civilized, or, at
| least, Christian humanity is certainly suffering an eclipse in our
| day. We cannot dip into the pages of modern fiction, modern
| poetry, or modern journalism, without perceiving that youth
| and innocence are no longer associated as they used to be in
| men's, minds. Things are said contravening this alliance which
| not only people would have been ashamed to say thirty years
| ago but which would not have occurred to the same people to
| say. The charm of girlhood used to be indissolubly connected.
| with purity and innocence ~ an innocence which certain writers
| despised because intercourse with the world took off its edge;
| because it was, according to their view, a merely passive,
| involuntary quality, depending on seclusion and ignorance of
| evil; but such as it was, virgin purity was a generally received
| ideal. Whatever a girl of eighteen might become, however soon
| simplicity and bashfulness might be exchanged for their
| opposites, youth, to be like itself, and also to be engaging and
| attractive, was supposed to be innocent. And love naturally
| attached the idea of freshness and goodness to the thing it
| loved. Even if appearances were unfavourable, and the woman
| beloved showed objectionable qualities to the world at large,
| the lover of past fiction believed in her; he saw farther than
| other people; what was faulty was a mere outside mask; he
| could discover truth and womanly virtue underneath; and this
| persuasion erroneous or well founded, was necessary to his
| allegiance. To realize a woman's worthlessness or selfishness,
| was to cease to love.  I shall never meet with such another
| woman, sighed the boy-lover of old, even when he had been
| jilted by a heartless coquette, and resigned his pretensions.
| Once to have loved her was to have supposed her excellent, and
| to cling to the idea still. As far as we can judge from
| newspapers, books, and detached scenes and critiques upon
| them, the popular press is altogether changing its tone; and so
| far from frivolity, selfishness, and heartlessness, when plainly
| and obtrusively apparent, being repellant qualities, they are in
| the new view of things essentials to fascination. The beautiful
| women of modern sensational romance are syrens, not
| pretending to be angels and taken for what they pretend to be,
| but known for syrens, and adored as such. And the younger she
| is, the more her years point to the old <p> 
| 'age of innocence,' </p> the more 
| <pb n="185"> 
| cold-blooded is the enchantress, and worshipped
| accordingly. The men in a modern novel will apostrophise the
| woman who engrosses their thoughts and makes their hearts
| ache ~~ or, in sober language makes them neglect their
| business ~~ as a fiend; and the young lady accepts the insinuation
| at least as a compliment to her charms, and gaily enlarges on
| her want of heart, on her entire selfishness, her indifference to
| the feelings of her lovers, who are an essential part of her state,
| and, above all, on her resolute eye to the main chance ~~ not the
| old main chance, of rank and a certain income, so much as a
| future of riotous, reckless parade and profusion. In English
| prose fiction we have scarcely got farther than all exhibition of
| these qualities, and the complications, that arise out of them.
| They are, not pushed to their natural consequences. For up to
| this time the success of a book ~~ which means its
| sale ~~ depends on some outward illogical attention to the
| decencies of society; a requirement which must exceedingly
| bore and embarrass any writer who cares for philosophical
| correctness and the dependence of effects on causes. In comparing
| themselves with French novelists, our writers must feel at a
| cruel disadvantage, and must often be ashamed of the clumsy
| expedients they are driven to by punctilio, the necessities of the
| publisher, or whoever else feels the pulse of popular morality. It
| has been agreed hitherto, that in any novel which hopes, to find
| a place on the drawing-room table, there must be a pull-up
| somewhere if things seem to be going too far ~~ some
| coincidence preventing the last scandal, and arresting the
| headlong progress of events. How long this awkward inartistic
| mode of saving appearances is to be submitted to is a question
| which is evidently trying some of the more popular of our
| sensational writers; and we discern a growing courage on their
| part, no unnatural consequence of the toleration they have
| hitherto met. People who have endured so much, they may well
| think, have committed themselves to more. 'Lady Audley's
| Secret' and 'The Doctor's Wife' lead up very naturally to 'The
| Lady's Mile,' a recent novel by Miss Braddon, which leads our
| article, and which we cannot but regard as a bold, if not
| impatient, effort in its authoress to cast off trammels which
| must daily grow more irksome. 
| <paragraph> 
| The story's two
| heroines are, it is true, both saved to society; but the one wife
| has packed up her trunk, and handsomely enclosed the key of
| her jewel-box in an envelope addressed to her husband,
| preparatory to her departure next morning with her lover in the
| 8.30 train of the London, Chatham, and Dover Railway; when
| the unexpected arrival of the husband, and his announcement
| that he is taking the lady off to Devonshire by the 8 train
| to-morrow morning, frustrates the scheme of elopement, and
| <pb n="186"> 
| restores everything at once and for ever to its right
| footing. And to the other married heroine a similar journey, at
| the close of the third volume, is suggested under similar
| circumstances ~~ a proposal which the whole course of the
| narrative would lead us to suppose would be acquiesced in
| without the fraction of a scruple, when the authoress turns
| round upon us with the assurance that this lady, named Flo,
| <quotation> </quotation>
| Flo insisted on making a confidante of Cecil: the
| other prudent wife, who proposed a breach of the Seventh
| Commandment by half an hour ~ <quotation> </quotation>
| <pb n="187"> 
| This exceedingly fluent and precocious young lady, Flo,
| is the daughter of a painter, who embodies Miss Braddon's
| ideas of success in art as well as its true principles. And success
| in these books call hardly be called such under six thousand a
| year, which, if we recollect right, is his professional income at
| the date of this story. Having early lost his wife, he had allowed
| her relations to take his only child, and to choose the
| fashionable school in which the ideas of life just quoted were
| formed, and put to the test in the course of these volumes.
| <paragraph> 
| We have said that the prose fictions now in vogue
| amongst us do not dare to push the triumphs and perils of
| selfishness, beyond a point. Their heroines dance on the brink
| of the precipice, but do not topple over; the men rail at them
| in good set terms, as syrens and Delilahs; but in a corner
| of their hearts we are expected to detect that they cannot quite
| believe in the selfishness that charms them; they fancy it
| assumed where their own interests are concerned ~~ though, in
| fact, there is nothing so rarely simulated as selfishness ~~ and we
| are not to think things as bad as they seem. The dominion of
| the five senses over every higher influence, however
| persistently inculcated, is not boldly professed. It is felt
| decorous, and probably satisfies some feeling in the writer, to
| introduce at intervals certain reflections on the hollowness of
| society, the vanity and short duration of pleasure, the general
| wickedness of the world, and the position and office of women,
| as merely reflexes of the motives and influences of society at
| large, as though they were victims of a sort of necessity. It is
| only in verse that selfishness is acknowledged without
| disguise as the proper and most effectual inspiration of a pretty
| woman. Such of our readers as have read 'Chastelard,' will not
| think we have spoken too strongly. Mr. Swinburne accepts
| Mary as her worst enemies, or, we should rather say, as history
| and every fresh insight into her times, have drawn her. He has
| formed his idea of her character from the letters of the casket,
| beautiful, bright, cruel, merciless, sensual, shameless, and
| utterly selfish; and portrays her as the ideal fascination, and the
| man's love for her as only intensified by his knowledge
| of her real nature, to which he appeals, even to her face, in his
| last parting with her who loved him after her tiger fashion, and 
| yet gave him up to execution for her convenience. His fear is,
| that she may be making a mistake. 
| <quotation> 
| <pb n="188">
| </quotation>
| Chastelard knows that the only chance of winning
| even a passing regret is to divest her thoughts from the self of
| the present to the self of the future. And again he contemplates
| the terrible victories of the queen of hearts:
| <quotation> </quotation>
| And while Mary visits him in prison for the purpose of
| wheedling out of him the reprieve which her self-interest had
| led her to grant at one stage of the affair, he lets her know what
| is in her heart, thus: ~ 
| <quotation> </quotation>
| She had, no treachery or
| cruelty hidden from him; he loves her with his eyes wide open
| to it all. 
| <paragraph>
| All this is regarded by a good many as very moving and
| passionate verse. This, however, is not our subject; but it
| seems to us that unwholesome brooding over unwholesome
| reading is more at the bottom of such pictures and ideas than
| anything deserving the name of imagination. After all the
| scenes the reader of 'Chastelard' has been admitted to, we
| cannot but regard the lover's false oath on the point of
| execution, wherein he invokes upon himself the <p> 'heaviest place
| in hell' </p> if the queen is not stainless towards all men, as a
| blunder as well as a crime against morality. No imagination
| capable of spanning the gulf between sense and reason could
| give to mere sensual passion such a triumph at such a moment.
| But we quote them as illustrative of the bold line of mere 
| sensualism which is more than tolerated amongst us. To love a
| bad woman because she is pretty and graceful, under no
| illusions, but knowing that she is bad, is simple baseness. It is a
| mere insult to our nobler emotions to expect to excite them in
| such a theme; but there are people who imagine they see an
| emancipation from puritanical prejudice, and a deeper, freer
| insight into human nature in this delineation of passion, which,
| if possible at all, can only be in natures too earthy and vulgar to
| be fit subjects for art. But we must revert to prose.
| <paragraph> 
| In one place,
| the authoress of the 'Lady's Mile' seems to 
| <pb n="189">
| tell her readers pretty plainly that she
| goes no further than they wish her to go. In this novel she
| brings upon the scene her favourite sensational writer, who
| made his first appearance in the 'Doctor's Wife' as the novelist
| of penny papers. It is a very sprightly conception, exceedingly
| well sustained The most commonplace of men, the most quiet
| and moderate in all his tastes, sensation is his business, and all
| the pleas of the crown his stock-in-trade. He is for ever
| constructing the most terrible of plots, which come as they are
| wanted into his fertile brain, and are as much in his day's
| work as an allotted space of ground is to the digger.  In the
| 'Lady's Mile' this industry has told in an advanced social
| position. Still business-like and severely correct in his habits,
| he expatiates over all the eccentricities and atrocities of
| passion upon paper, and does so because he finds it answers.
| <quotation> </quotation>
| In fact, her
| ideal sensationalist has nothing of the 'Bohemian' to adopt the
| odious euphemism for disrepute ~~ that one feature of
| housekeeping ~~ that one geniality which our authoress never
| withholds from in individual or a society worthy of her
| sympathy. No landlady ~~ not Mrs. Gamp herself ~~ has a greater
| horror of locks and keys, and distinct times for eating and
| drinking, which may not be anticipated or unduly prolonged,
| than she manifests on every occasion where the expression of
| the sentiment is possible. The word unlimited is dear to her. It
| atones even for homely surroundings otherwise abhorrent.
| Whenever something to eat and drink and smoke is always
| going, her spirit can conceive the idea of comfort, repose, and
| positive satisfaction. So the modest dwelling of Mr. and Mrs.
| Smythe, far removed from the felicity and true life of fashion,
| was yet a home, for ~ 
| <quotation> </quotation>
| Even the young
| artist, before we are expected to care for him, is so far
| emancipated from the first struggles of his profession that
| he can entertain his friends with unlimited bitter beer from
| <pb n="190">
| the nearest
| tavern, and keep an unfailing supply of mild tobacco in the
| French china jar that adorned his chimney-piece. It is these
| two representations of small profusion whom we find in the
| first chapter watching the carriages in the 'Lady's Mile,' which
| we  may as well inform our quiet country reader, means the
| drive in Hyde Park, and introducing the coquettish heroine,
| Flo, the painter's daughter, to us: ~~ 
| <quotation> 
| <pb n="191">
| </quotation>
| <paragraph> 
| In spite
| of the implied protest against these mercenary ideas in girls of
| eighteen, the whole bearing of the book is to teach them that 
| there is no happiness without money ~~ that life is not life
| without carriages and shops, and inexhaustible riches and a carte
| blanche from somebody to indulge in every extravagant whim.
| The mere repetition of these two words 'carte blanche' page
| after page is immoral in its suggestion of riot among costly 
| trifles: the very catalogue, of shops, the knowledge our
| authoress possesses or affects to possess of the right places in
| which to spend a fortune, is dissipation. The reader is seldom
| introduced to a dinner, a bonnet, a chair, a table, or a chariot,
| without being told what it cost and where he, or rather she, may get
| one like it. In fact, the book may be regarded as a key for the
| use of those whose ideas of high life are derived from
| shop-windows and equipages. A hundred articles,
| unintelligible as they stand, have their purpose explained and are
| classed among the essentials of fashionable existence. To be
| sure, they are often denounced in the lump, and sentences and
| chapters are rounded off with a few phrases of trite morality on
| the unsatisfying nature of such joys; but it must be observed
| that they are the only joys the authoress succeeds in effectively
| presenting to her readers. From all ideas of thrift and
| economy her soul recoils with a force very apt to communicate 
| itself to the unwary reader. Now and then, indeed, we have
| pictures of simplicity and moderation; but the images she draws
| under this temporary influence are more depressing to the
| owner of a limited income than her profusion. She introduces
| the sentimental heroine, Lady Cecil, to the sentimental hero
| over a breakfast of chops, fish, and game, luscious plums, and
| hot-house grapes, with the following parade of their content in
| such homely fare, made tolerable by the excitement of a new
| sensation: <quotation> </quotation>
| Eating and drinking, we observe, are very courageously 
| <pb n="192">
| treated as tastes upon which
| the heroines of this school may show as fine and
| practised a discernment as the heroes. French dishes, it is true,
| have always been found by the novelists a very convenient
| mode of proving themselves on familiar terms, with fashionable
| life; but there is a reality and sentiment, given to them in these
| pages as denoting profusion and self-indulgence, which
| coupled with contemptuous denunciation of the torture of
| genteel poverty and all the economies indispensable to small
| means, centres the mind on a merely sensual existence. 
| <paragraph> 
| Writers
| of this school have as great a contempt for work as they have
| for economy. Genius, is allowed, indeed, to make occasional
| frantic efforts. A painter may paint his eyes out without
| incurring reproach; but the work of the world is done in these
| novels by men incapable of inspiring a passion. Every man who
| does anything useful spoils himself for a hero, and degenerates
| into a machine. All the honest callings which
| constitute a social community are passed in review only to
| show how mean, poor, and unsatisfying a part a woman must
| play in the companionship of those who carry them on. A lover
| worthy of the name must have nothing else to
| do, and has a poor chance if fortune has not aided him with the means
| to be idle and worthless and devoted on a very splendid scale. It is
| always an excuse for whatever this authoress's heroines may find
| themselves tempted to do, that their husbands have
| a profession that occupies their morning, and even infringes
| upon the evening. In the novel before us, the sentimental
| heroine finds her dishonourable lover at an advantage over her
| husband, that he had sold out just before his regiment sailed for
| Japan that he might be near her. Of course, we are assured that all
| this is very wrong ~ it is even, to suit the English
| market, called wickedness; but there it is. The word sacrifice
| comes over and over again ~~ sacrifice of credit and honour, and so
| forth ~~ all regarded as natural claims: ~  <quotation> </quotation>
| <paragraph>
| Thus worth and noble qualities are not
| more esteemed by the ladies than we have shown to be by the
| men. But <quotation> </quotation> (nor, as far as we can
| see, to any of this lady's heroines,) ~~ 
| <quotation> 
| <pb n="193"> 
| </quotation>
| <paragraph> 
| Lady Cecil had married
| to escape <p> 'the slow torture of genteel poverty, represented in
| her aunt's menage by a careful  casting up of butcher's bills and
| a vigilant eye over domestic peculations.' </p> Her soldier-lover,
| Hector, after flirting with her for some months had put it to
| her on parting whether he ought to keep an engagement of
| which, till this moment, he had not said a word, or throw the
| first love over and marry her. In this predicament Cecil is
| honourable: bids him go to India and keep his word with the
| lady, she herself, in due time, marrying the great lawyer Mr.
| O'Boyneville, a brisk, and indeed entertaining personage, to
| escape her aunt's painful economies. The lawyer is amusing to
| everybody but his wife: ~ 
| <quotation> </quotation>
| <paragraph> 
| In justice to this business-loving
| husband, it must be, explained that when he talked to her of
| what interested him she gave no response; and when he invited
| his friends and their wives to grand dinners, where there was no
| longer need to weigh the respective cost of different dishes, the
| <p> 'legal magnates with whom the great O'Boyneville chiefly
| associated were not interesting to his young wife.' </p> So, when
| Hector comes back a widower and meets Lady Cecil
| O'Boyneville at Flo's (now Mrs. Lobyer's) grand palace of a
| house, she at once conceives more mistrust of herself than the
| legal magnates' stupid wives would have at all approved. She is
| represented as making feeble efforts to escape the danger she
| finds in the presence of her old lover; but her honest,
| straightforward husband does not assist them. He persists in
| thinking change of air and scene good for her; for the
| shuddering, shivering dulness of Brunswick Square had been
| too much for her delicate sensibilities, and the luxurious and
| congenial society of Flo's home were of evident service to her
| health and spirits. This absolute and thoughtless trust of her
| offends his wife. Like the odalisque of the harem, she would
| prefer being <p> 'the guarded flower.' </p> The husband 
| <pb n="194">
| drops down upon his wife in the transient intervals of business,
| and instead of detecting that things are going wrong, makes
| himself the life of the party and the idol of all the ladies, young
| and old, who pour out their feelings to his wife.
| <quotation> </quotation>
| Of course, Fate is a power made to bear a gret deal in stories
| like this. <p> 'Heaven knows that she did her best to avoid him'
| </p> (the manor); but her best efforts were weak and futile as
| <p> 'compared to the machinery which the Eumenides employed
| against her.' </p> At races, and picnics, and water-parties, and
| rustic gatherings of every description, Lady Cecil was always
| finding Hector Gordon by her side. Our disapproval is to be
| propitiated by the <p> 'remorseful agonies' </p> that embitter
| her share of these entertainments; but the great point made
| after a few sentences of that high-flown morality for which
| the penny press is famous ~~ where our authoress probably
| acquired her proficiency in the dialect ~~ is woman's helplessness.
| There are two extreme schools in the present day; the one
| strong-minded, which gives to women the task of guiding not
| only themselves by mankind; the other, which expresses itself
| in the sensational novel, and represents woman as the creature
| of circumstances ~~ as possessing no independent existence ~~
| as personating, against her will, the predominant influences
| of society ~~ as being what man makes her. Whatever phrases
| of abstract morality may be interspersed in the narrative, we
| remain with the impression that Cecil could not help herself. 
| The real moral of the story shows itself in such profanities as:
| ~~ <quotation> </quotation>
| This is one state; but soon <p> 'that fatal feeling of
| helplessness which holds the dreamer in its spell' </p>
| possessed her. In fact, the
| <pb n="195">
| interesting woman in these books never does help herself, or
| get out of any quagmire she may plunge into, without the aid
| of some violent intervention, to which the French novel is
| superior, leaving things to take their natural course. We have
| said how Cecil was saved at the last moment from adultery
| when her boxes were packed. After this very narrow escape she
| has a nervous illness, out of which seh issues a good wife,
| and quite content to receive the wedding cards of Hector's
| second marriage with a smiling face. But all this propriety
| is lfet for the last chapter or two; the progress of the story
| is entirely after the French model. And yet Cecil has had that
| unusual feature of respectability, <p> 'a woman shrewd, a
| widowed aunt,' </p> belonging to her. Most of this writer's
| heroines stnad absolutely alone, and have to manage their
| affairs without feminine aid or hindrance. And this imparts
| a sort of disreputableness to the whole series of her fictions;
| independent of the doings and sayings of the isolated beauties,
| it suggests a very queer, rakish sort of society, where young
| women can come and go with no elder to advise or protect them.
| The society depicted in these books has no resemblance to 
| the received ideas of respectable English society in any class,
| and on this account alone is very unsafe reading for young people.
| The lively heroine, Flo, the painter's daughter, inasmuch as
| she is heartless and money-loving, is represented as moving
| with much less peril than the superior Cecil in the dissipation
| which it is the skill of Miss Braddon to depict with cleverness
| and a certain attraction. She marries a Manchester millionaire.
| Now money earned in any way is, under the ideas we find dominant
| here, sullied in the earning. Flo is mrecenary for marrying
| a man whom she acknowledges to be <p> <f> 'tout ce qu'il y
| a de plus Manchester.' <f> </p> This <p> 'Manchester man, </p>
| Flo's husband, Mr. Lobyer, has mercantile men about him,
| he talks of funds and stock, and it is not supposed possible
| that the money-market, or any of the politics of the subject,
| can be interesting to the <p> 'butterflies, </p> who profit
| by the master's conversance with these topics. He is therefore
| utterly out of place and keeping with the luxury with which
| he surrounds himself and the pretty wife whom he has married,
| on the principles upon which he chose his horses and furniture.
| As a portrait he is not without cleverness. In fact, the
| writer has a large collection of portraits of the particular
| sort of men steady-going golks do not want to know, who, indeed,
| rarely come under their ken. Mr. Lobyer is a mean and heartless
| lout, who has passed through Eton and subsequent experience of
| the world with the merest outside polish; but <p> 'out of a
| crowd of beautiful and intellectual women the Manchester man
| might have chosen the loveliest.' </p> On the ground that
| <p> 'the value of wealth increases with the growing refinement,
| <pb n="196">
| of taste the purest attribues of the human mind ~~ the love of
| art, the worship of beauty, the keen sense of grace ~~ combine
| to render intellectual men the slaves of material prosperity;'
| </p> and so on. All these fine terms, if reduced to practice,
| mean, with this authoress, the passion for spending; for buying
| pictures, and statues, and expensive nick-nacks; for having
| everything luxurious and handsome about you; for diamonds of
| the purest water; three hundred guinea chariots, matched 
| footmen, and high-stepping horses ~~ which all are tastes which,
| for their <p> 'unlimited gratification,' </p> need a millionaire,
| wherever he got his money. There is one touch in his portrait
| which strikes us as highly descriptive of the boor class. In
| the beginning of his courtship he pays court to Florence's
| cockatoo: ~~ <quotation> </quotation>
| Most of us have been entertained by the exhibition of
| sallies of this sort in men feeling themselves privileged
| to stop all rational or continusous discourse by noisy or
| tumultuous cat or dog contests, and fancuing their bad
| manners atoned for by the show of kindliness and geniality
| indissolubly associated, in some minds, with what is called
| the love of animals, though the thing
| <pb n="197">
| we mean may seem to the sufferers more the preference of the
| brute over the human, than any positive admiration or tenderness.
| On such occasions we feel, with the ladies of Cranford, tantalized
| at a tea-party, by witnessing the whole contents of the miniature
| cream-jug poured into one saucer for Dash, under the plea, <p> 'Poor
| fellow, he is so intelligent. We were much more intelligent,'
| </p> argued the defrauded company; but it had not appeared
| so to their entertainer. 
| <paragraph>
| Flo insists, in the face of that <p> 'dear, disagreeable 
| old darling,' </p> and wonderful <p> 'old party,'</p> 
| her artist-father, on marrying Mr. Lobyer,
| and revels in wealth and fine company till a smash comes. Mr.
| Lobyer very appropriately goes to the dogs, and she finds herself a
| young widow; and the story ends, in her case, in her marrying, not
| the baronet she has flirted with all along, but the young artist, after
| all. As for anybody getting punished for wrong-doing, or any
| harm coming of it, this is not it all in the authoress's scheme. Thus
| the moral ~~ if we mean by it the end ~~ is hardly as satisfying to
| poetical justice as in the French novel. Folly and wickedness are
| treated as diseases of youth, from which there is little hope of
| escape, but which leave no subtle mischief behind. Middle life
| retains no more traces of them than it does of the measles and
| scarlatina which fevered its infancy. 
| <paragraph>
| It is a relief to turn from these fine ladies, lively or sentimental,
| who depend for what principles or character the last page accords
| them, to anything rather than their own moral strength, to a
| heroine of altogether another stamp, though she, too, embodies 
| an ideal of modern society, and is a conception which could not
| have occurred to its author out of our own time. However sound
| and intensely respectable is Mrs. Oliphant's Lucilla, however
| removed from the meretricious Delilahs of a popular school, it is
| not intended that we should detect in her any of the unconscious
| innocence of girlhood. She starts life if anything a deeper schemer
| than she leaves off; the world teaches her nothing that she did not
| know before. With the aid of a little instruction from 'Friends in
| Council' she appears upon the, scene a Minerva all armed, and
| from henceforth bows the world to her behests. 
| <paragraph>
| There must be resemblances where we can hope to establish a
| contrast, and perhaps one of these arises out of the wonderful
| fecundity of the authoresses before us. Since Miss Braddon
| appeared upon the scene, she writes with a rapidity that probably
| cannot be surpassed. But Mrs. Oliphant ~~ the name is too well
| known for any discourtesy to attach to our connecting it with the
| work before us ~~ has carried on the process of production at the
| same rate for a much longer period. We imagine, if we could see
| in one book-case the collected works of this lady, the 
| <pb n="198"> 
| display would test the limits of human belief. It has been held an
| impossibility, on this ground alone, that all the novels, not to
| speak of graver and more important works which report has
| attributed to her name, could be by the same hand. And when we
| consider further the difference of merit, the extremes of
| poverty and excellence, of which the series offers examples, the
| perplexity increases. That one and the same hand should produce
| so many weak and so many capital stories; that the good and
| the bad should dovetail into one another; that, after seeming utterly
| worn out, the pen should start in a new vein better than any that
| has been before; ~~ all this is baffling to ordinary penetration. The
| writer evidently has the power of putting more or less of mind
| into her work, as the subject deserves it. There seems a capability
| of writing as in a dream,
| working from a mere reflection of a mirror, like the lady of
| Shalott, and never lifting her eyes to see the real life which passes
| by: and then, turning from these shadows, the powers can rouse
| themselves to an effort, and draw a character like Edward Irving's
| and produce a Mr. Tozer and her Australian heroine ~~ creations of
| whom any novelist may be proud; portraits for truth and life
| scarcely to be surpassed. 
| <paragraph>
| Rapid writers must resemble each other in an evident yielding to
| certain innate guiding impulses. It takes time and study to 
| see the world as it really is, and character 
| as it reveals itself. We believe
| that throughout the impossible series we have contemplated as a
| fact there are certain images and situations that invariably occur,
| not material enough to constitute a likeness in the face of so much
| dissimilarity, but weakening the best below what might otherwise
| have been their place. A real consistent picture of the life we see,
| is perhaps as far beyond this accomplished writer's wishes as her
| powers. The habit of composition at full speed is incompatible
| with even the aim to produce it. To reconcile the world within with
| the world without, there must be pauses. It is pleasanter and easier
| to the flowing pen to ignore everything that calls for a stop. 
| Acute as is the authoress of the Carlingford series, bright and
| quick-sighted as are her observations on life and character, the
| world she draws is, as a whole, a perfectly different 
| world from the world we
| see; the real motives and forces that influence men have, no
| affinity very often with the influences she represents as
| controlling them.
| Above all, the effects of extreme rapidity in composition,
| and the absorption necessary to the effort, are injurious where the
| narrative occupies any length of time. Events which in real life
| would have a transient importance, influences which could only
| tell for days or weeks, dominate over long spaces of time, and an
| undue and  extravagant weight is given to trifles and insignificant
| <pb n="199">
| characters. It is amazing what things are supposed possible and
| under tension of mind held for such, where the daylight of
| deliberation is never let in. The story before us is in especial
| example of this. The conception of Miss Marjoribanks'
| character is admirable, the drawing full of spirit and
| humour. Her start in the life she plans for herself, if
| not probable, is at least allowably so for fiction; but to make her
| so royally potent for ten years of actual life, to
| represent all Carlingford thronging to her 'Thursdays,' and under
| her control, and occupied generally with, Lucilla
| for ten years, is an absurdity of the sort which irritates. Think of
| everything the same for ten years, and Lucilla
| arresting the wheels of time, and keeping Carlingford in act, in
| words, feelings, and intention, dependent on her
| direction! 
| <paragraph>
| But it is the especial infirmity of female writers, otherwise 
| very acute discerners, to reason from too bounded a view, to
| make great things hang on small occurrences only calculated
| to influence a family circle; to excite a neighbourhood, and to
| represent society as moved to its depths by incidents which
| would be lost and utterly disregarded in the real stir of life, to
| stretch nine-days' wonders into historical events, and to draw
| into the vortex of the plot and stimulate with its interests
| numbers on whom it can have no personal bearing. 
| <paragraph>
| The character of Miss Marjoribanks might be called elaborately
| drawn for the number of touches, but they are
| struck off on another principle. It is a true picture of a mind of
| a very distinct and genuine order, commoner than
| some of us are aware;
| and as the work of a real observer who evidently has taken
| extraordinary pleasure in the delineation, it is a valuable
| and suggestive contribution to the literature of  fiction. Lucilla, 
| is a born actor; she instinctively plans for spectators
| and an audience. She could not be  innocently unconscious of the
| world; and in this sense is never alone and on
| her guard. With a fancy embracing beforehand every  point of the
| situation, whatever it is, she can realize nothing
| apart from the effect of her own action in it. She rehearses
| everything beforehand with a view to this action. She is
| full of schemes for the benefit of others, but can entertain no
| ideas apart from self. With much foresight and
| boundless readiness, and an ambition to lead and direct all the
| world for their good, the impression she really
| makes on others never occurs to her: she cannot contemplate
| herself from without. She is impervious to ridicule
| on this ground, being satisfied with her own idea, and never for
| a moment off her guard. She profits, as we
| frequently find persons do in real life, from a bounded view and
| the absence of fancy and humour; and in the
| plenitude and even simplicity of self-esteem, speaks of herself
| and enumerates her designs with straightforwardness which
| <pb n="200">
| passes for playfulness and wit ~~ for anything but the grave literal
| meaning which it really is. We call quite
| understand how she gains the ascendency she does, over the
| little kingdom she means to rule, consisting at first
| of two very impracticable elements, ~~ her cool-headed father,
| accustomed to his own way, and his cook, hitherto
| supreme over him and his establishment: and how she uses
| them to accomplish her design of putting society upon
| a right footing in Carlingford and herself at the head of it. A
| strong will, a good understanding, favouring
| circumstances, and, above all, entertaining no aims or ideas
| beyond this very material ambition, are the means by
| which she accomplishes it. It is only a limited class of readers
| who care enough for skill and ingenuity in
| common-life portraiture, pursued in mere love
| of the sport, to be carried on unwearied to the end of
| Lucilla's ten years' labours; but such as do will have
| found themselves rewarded in the perusal of one of the least
| commonplace of novels. Such delineations are studies
| in a double sense. If we are only told what such heroines do and
| say we know nothing; we must always be
| admitted to the workings of the mind. For this great delicacy of
| touch is needed; the habit of dissecting thought
| may otherwise degenerate into a trick, the processes may easily
| fail in variety, or the author, letting us into the
| inner mechanism, may forget to put thought into words, or be
| negligent of the mode by which they express themselves.
| The present writer fails often through this inadvertence. 
| In the habit of telling her readers how the mind
| of her favourite works its ends, she grows careless of
| actual expression, and is content with a formula where this
| is least to be tolerated
| Persons always intent on producing one class of
| effects are likely enough to fall into mannerism; they are
| pretty sure to want nature and spontaneity of expression;
| but this authoress, when she has found a formula that represents
| the character of her subject, does not scruple to
| make it serve for ten years at a stretch; and in her best novels
| there are always some one or two who, whatever
| mental fluctuations they may pass through, and however 
| carefully these may be drawn, always deliver themselves
| with the same action and in very much the same words. If Lucilla
| had really asserted to all her friends, and wound
| up every revelation of her designs by the declaration that her one
| aim in life <p> 'was to be a comfort to papa,' </p> she
| would have had no influence at all. All people are sensitive to
| verbal repetitions, and minds of real power scarcely
| ever fall into the trick of them. With this writer these repetitions
| stand for a sort of et cetera
| which the reader is expected to interpret and dress into variety.
| Another habit we must specify as, where not a
| deliberate affectation, a mark of hurried composition, that of
| introducing certain colloquial turns of expression,~~
| phrases which are only agreeable 
| <pb n="201">
| when they come rarely and are of sudden occurrence to the
| writer. Rapid voluminous talkers fill up what would
| be pauses aud blanks in less fluent speakers, with a sort of
| bye-play of communication with the person addressed,
| with frequent repetitions of his name, invoking his attention with
| <p> 'You knows,' </p> <p> 'You sees' </p> ~~ 
| all efforts to keep hold
| of the ear by the button, as it were. The pens of not a few female
| writers adopt the same system, and interpolate
| familiar appeals into the narrative; so that each reader shall fancy
| himself individually addressed and coaxed
| into sympathy. With imitators this trick is deliberately put on. 
| In the present instance it comes of the mere
| carelessness of facility, and disfigures an unusually clear and
| graceful style. The printers ought to have licence to
| strike out nine out of every ten <p> 'to be sures' </p> 
| and  <p> 'naturallys' </p> that meet their quick,
| detective glance.  Miss Marjoribanks suffers exceptionally
| in this respect, because the character so fully
| delineated extremely amuses the author, and is drawn throughout
| with gentle irony, for which she craves the
| reader's sympathy. It is, in fact, a satire on the managing class on
| the one hand, and the world that submits to be
| managed by women of this order on the other. The story so far
| gives in to the new worldly idea of girlhood, that
| Lucilla starts her career an <p> 'older hand' </p> ~~ if we may be
| permitted the vulgarism ~~ than she leaves off. In fact, like
| all biographers, the author grows fond of her creation.
| The tears her heroine, sheds in the opening page for
| her mother are not such genuine tears as those that flow for her
| father at the end; and ten years of scheming ~~ not
| exactly selfish scheming, but which cannot be otherwise
| described ~~ leave her a simpler character than we find
| her at fifteen. 
| <paragraph>
| Lucilla is first introduced to us on her journey homewards,
| whither she had been summoned on the unexpected
| death of her invalid mother. A fine, tall, forward girl, and
| already a woman of the world, her thoughts embrace all
| the consequences to herself of the new situation: ~~ 
| <quotation> 
| <pb n="202">
| </quotation>
| Nothing can be more apparently unpromising than the father
| for whom this sacrifice was contemplated. But the manager
| must not be sensitive. Thought, in this character, takes
| another direction; positive aims are too absorbing things 
| for the torturing suggestions of sensibility to get any
| hold. The doctor ~~ throughout admirably sustained ~~
| was from home on her arrival: ~~
| <quotation>
| <pb n="203">
| </quotation>
| Under this stimulus he begins to talk to her of an early
| return to school, as the means of restoring her spirits
| to their natural tone: ~~
| <quotation>
| <pb n="204">
| </quotation>
| The Doctor keeps his daughter at bay four years; but
| after finishing her education by a year of foreign
| travel, she returns home and takes possession. Her 
| desires are not of the ordinary young lady sort, but
| somewhat Amazonian in character. Marriage with her is
| a resource, not a primary object. All the freshness
| of her youth and powers she means to devote to the
| foundation of society in Carlingford. A little scene
| with a quondam schoolfellow lets us into the religious
| aspect of the character. She has allowed it to transpire
| that the language of love and admiration is not new
| to her: ~~ <quotation>
| <pb n="205">
| </quotation>
| The modes by which Lucilla gains the ascendency she
| covets are original, and a testimony to the authoress's
| penetration. Her candour is one great engine ~~ that
| candour which we often see the result of profound
| self-reliance. There is a lady in Carlingford
| celebrated for her talent of mimicry, by which she
| renders herself a terror to her own circle. Miss
| Marjoribanks takes an early opportunity of showing
| her fearlessness. There is a dear old lady who believes
| profoundly in Lucilla; this lady the mimic takes off,
| in her way: ~~
| <quotation> </quotation>
| Her next care is to bring her father's menage into such
| a state of perfection as shall assist her in the primary
| object of her life. Her cousin, Tom Marjoribanks, who
| assists in the following scene, is an admirer whom she
| has had to snub. Refurnishing is not at all in the
| Doctor's style; but she takes the bull by the horns,
| and after some comments on the twenty-two years which
| have elapsed since the process had been gone through
| before: ~~
| <pb n="206">
| <quotation> </quotation>
| <pb n="207">
| There is no doubt something of caricature in all this,
| but it is derived from nature, and is ture at bottom.
| The people who get their way in this world are not those
| who sound the depths of other minds, but who have profound
| faith in themselves and their power of getting it. The
| programme f her life her laid out is carried out in the
| course of a story. The writer amuses herself rather with
| depciting things as they are or seem, than drawing a
| moral from them; and Lucilla, who is some hands would
| degenerate in the process, gains under the habits of a 
| decorous and energetic life. Many impossible scenes,
| to illustrate her presence of mind, control over
| circumstances and general sway over persons and events,
| are given; for in spite of so many happy strokes and
| evidences of keen insight, it seems indispensable with
| this authoress that the society she depicts should be 
| a fancy picture, and something entirely alien from
| our experience. At the close we come to a change in
| in Lucilla's fortunes. Her wealthy father dies suddenly
| from the shock, as it proves, of an entire loss of his
| property. The effect of both trials on the heroine are
| given with an extraordinary truth and delicacy of
| delineation. The spirit of management, it may have been
| observed, renders those under its influence philosophical
| under some classes of loss. They don't lose themselves
| at once in losing surroundings; for they still have faith
| in a work to be done of which they must be the doers. 
| But the merit here lies in the photographic truth with
| which the course of sensation incident to an active mind 
| upon sudden reverse is given. The circumstances of the
| Doctor's last evening are given with detail. The next
| morning he is found dead, to the horror and dismay
| of all Carlingford: ~~
| <quotation>
| <pb n="208">
| </quotation>
| Then comes the funeral, the peculiar sense of loss and
| emptiness in the mere thought of death, in a man of
| the Doctor's sort.
| <quotation>
| <pb n="209">
| </quotation>
| But Lucilla has to be further tried; and succeeding 
| upon the funeral come the vision and confirmation of
| ruin. The news is broken to her by a weak-minded aunt,
| who happens to be on a visit at the time. Aunt Jemima,
| after the pattern of incinsistend womanhood, will not
| understand the circumstances, feels as if she never
| could forgive her brother-in-law for bringing up
| Lucilla as he has done, and leaving her without a
| farthing, and breaks into offers of protection and
| a home: ~~
| <quotation> </quotation>
| When left to herself she begins to think, and the
| train of thought, and the effect of external things
| upon it, are given with what, in spite of feminine
| authorship, we may call a master's hand: ~~
| <quotation>
| <pb n="210">
| </quotation>
| We wish, if only as a matter of taste, that the flippant
| allusion to Solomon, which at once interupts and
| vulgarizes the tone, had been omitted; but it is a
| passing specimen of the easy terms on which Mrs.
| Oliphant stands towards all themes and topics.
| It is owing, no doubt, to the feminine tendency
| already alluded to, of giving undue weight and
| influence to trifles, that there is uniformly to
| be found, in her best novels, a glaring discrepancy
| between her plots and her characters. The incidents
| are apt to be far-fetched, romantic, improbable ~~
| the connexion between cause and effect fails ~~ the
| reader's experience rebels against them: the characters
| themselves, and the observations upon life and society,
| are full of truth, point, and originality; and it is
| just as the reader's own leanings dispose him to overlook
| absurd improbabilities in the story, for the sake of the
| lively and graphic realizing enerby with which the detail
| is worked out, or to weary of the elaborate touches by
| which it is attempted to prove the impossible probable, 
| that he will read with pleased sustained attention to the 
| end, or flag midway.
| Every study of a character, working out fair natural aims 
| in a 
| <pb n="211">
| whoslesome state of society, if done with care and love
| of the work, is, in its degree, of real value to literature.
| 'Miss Margoribanks' is such a contribution; she teaches
| something, and leaves an image of vigorous self-reliance
| on the mind. But the society of Miss Braddon's heroines
| ~~ the best and steadiest of them objects of impertinent
| gallantry, and indifferent, indeed unconscious, of the
| disrespect; radiant in dazzling toilettes, their heads
| adorned with <p> 'Ode's last madness, in the shape of a
| bonnet,' </p> running from shop to shop, and for ever
| presenting cheques for their milliners' bills to
| subservient mankind, and shaping themselves inside and out
| into fascination with the sole view, as we gather, of cartes
| blanches, of flirting and idling, eating and drinking; with
| no thought but the present, with no joys but of sense; no
| griefs that may not be indulged in the depths of easy-chairs,
| or that are incompatible with an unbroken succession of
| picnics, operas, balls, and fine clothes ~~ is mischievous
| and dangerous company. Apart from direct harm, or morality
| openy infringed, never was life made so poor a thing, or
| ambition so mean, or woman so mere a slave to luxury, so
| incapable of self-help or an independent existence, or
| of any pleasures or occupations that have not attentions and
| admiration ~~ for their own sake, not for his who bestows 
| them ~~ and supremacy in show and parade, for their end and
| aim. It is impossible but that much reading of this sort must
| be injurious to young people, as tending to lower their ideas
| at once of the poetry, the dignity, and the purpose of life.
| Never was it more necessary than it is at present for their
| elders and advisers to point out to them what fiction is
| safe and even profitable relaxation, and what is harmful
| and degrading.