| <The Saturday Review March 15, 1862>
| <Which Does She Love?>
| <Lord Robert Cecil>
| <pb n="305">
| In an age when every man is profoundly sensible of the 
| duty of mending his neighbour's ways, we could desire 
| to contribute our mite to the common stock of mutual 
| improvement by founding a reformatory for novelists.  
| It is a weary and disheartening labour to go on for ever 
| reproving the backslidings of this stiff-necked race.  It 
| is in vain to preach to them ~~ they only reply by 
| another three volumes full of their old sins, as tiresome 
| and unreadable as ever.  Their evil habits require a 
| more systematic eradication.  They must be subjected to 
| critical discipline for a period varying with the 
| heinousness of their offence, and not exposed again to 
| the temptations of pen and ink, and the society of the 
| publisher who originally seduced them from the paths 
| of good taste, until they are thoroughly cured.  Of 
| course it would be hopeless to enumerate all the forms 
| of nonsense of which it may be hoped that such a 
| reformatory might cure even the most confirmed 
| novel-writer.  But there are two prominent vices to which the 
| attention of the philanthropist should be specially 
| directed.  To treat them, according to the prevalent 
| fashion, not as vices, but as moral diseases, we should 
| call one of them the Mayfair mania, or 
| <hi rend="italic"> lucs Belgraviana. </hi>  It shows itself in 
| an irrepressible desire to depict with the minutest detail, 
| and the most damnable iteration, the manners and 
| customs of that happy race that dwells within smell of 
| the balmy Serpentine.  The appropriate remedy for this 
| affection is a course of realistic training, tending to 
| dissipate the halo which ignorance, flunkeyism, and a 
| devout study of the <hi rend="italic"> Morning Post 
| </hi> tend to gather round the heads of those who live 
| in the West End.  The patient should be sentenced to 
| aristocratic society for a year, so that he may convince 
| himself that morality and intellect are not particularly 
| affected either way by degrees in the peerage, and that 
| fashionable ladies do not invariably make violent love 
| upon the first introduction.  A course of large dinners 
| might also be prescribed, in order to carry home to him 
| the conviction that soup, when handled by plush and 
| hair-powder, remains nevertheless (unless the powder 
| tumbles in) nothing but soup after all.  But the other 
| moral malady is more destructive still.  It may be best 
| described as incontinence of tall talk.  Fashion and fine 
| writing between them ruin nine-tenths of the novels that 
| cumber Mr. Mudie's shelves; but we are inclined to 
| think that the fine writing is far the most fatal habit of 
| the two.  A man must be very far removed indeed from 
| the Belgravian firmament before he thinks its 
| constellations worth describing, except in a satire; but 
| fine writing is a temptation to which all are exposed.  
| Perhaps a course of stump-oratory is the best remedy.  
| No doubt so much eloquence finds its way into our 
| novels simply because the writers have no other vent to 
| give it.  Tucy cannot really believe that the young 
| gentlemen and young ladies whose conversations they 
| undertake to report actually talk to each other in rolling 
| sentences a page long.  They must be aware, at least 
| from their own experience, that love-scenes are not 
| usually conducted in the language Mr. Everett employs 
| in his orations.  But it is the only public opportunity 
| they have for the delivery of their over-burdened souls.  
| The magniloquent perorations with which "Ada" and 
| "Hubert" are made to reply to each other in a romantic 
| green lane, are in truth only gems from the speeches 
| with which the author would have electrified the world 
| long ago if an unkind fate had but given him a chance.  
| If he had ever so small a stump whereon to vent his 
| oratorical powers, he would not put the speeches of a 
| debating society into the mouths of his hero and heroine.  
| They would be allowed to speak the ordinary slip-slop 
| in which they were brought up, and to indulge in the 
| abundant anacoluthon which is the favourite figure in 
| English conversation.
| Mr. Colburn Mayne is a victim principally to the latter 
| propensity.  In respect to the fashionable world he even 
| shows a certain amount of virtue.  Though he brings 
| several of is characters to London, he does not take one 
| of them to a ball.  There is not a single flirtation in 
| Rotten Row, nor a debauchee peer from one end of the 
| novel to the other.  A lisping subaltern with an 
| aristocratic name is the only requisition Mr. Mayne 
| makes upon the traditional stock of fashionable 
| properties.  But the few glimpses he does give us of his 
| views of fashionable life show that it is only his 
| self-restraint that has preserved him from countesses who 
| make assignations at first sight, and duchesses who 
| elope at the third interview.  He is possessed with the 
| same strange idea that haunts so many novelists, 
| touching the special accessibility of <p> "the upper ten 
| thousand."  </p> That it is the peculiarity of fashionable 
| people, male and female, and to a certain extent of 
| English people in general, to pick up anybody they may 
| meet in picture galleries, museums, streets, and so forth, 
| and after ten minutes' conversation to swear eternal 
| friendship, appears to be the one point on which there is 
| a <hi rend="italic"> consensus </hi> among the 
| explorers who undertake to tell the outside world what 
| mysterious Belgravia is like.  One of the heroes of the 
| book (there are four or five) is a youth of eighteen, 
| named Lionel.  He quarrels with his stepmother, runs 
| away from home, and walks up to London, a distance of 
| fifty miles.  On his arrival he sleeps at a small inn, and 
| the next day goes to call on an actor whom he had met 
| strolling about the country, and with whom he had 
| formed a friendship.  At this point is introduced the 
| solitary fashionable character in the book, one Sir 
| George Savile by name, who makes his appearance in a 
| chapter headed, "The Man of the World." The man of 
| the world drives up in a brougham just as Lionel is 
| relating to his actor friend how he ran away from his 
| stepmother.  Thereupon Sir George Savile, who knows 
| the actor, immediately invites Lionel to jump into his 
| brougham, and drive off to lunch at his villa on the 
| Thames with Sir Edwin Landseer and Lord Carlisle, 
| Madam Alboni, and a great number of other 
| distinguished persons.  Not satisfied with these favours, 
| the man of the world shortly afterwards offers Lionel to 
| take him into his house on the footing of a younger 
| brother, and <p> "to provide him with dress, money, 
| and everything suitable for that station."  </p> It may 
| be doubted whether men of the world generally would 
| be eager to endorse this definition of the legitimate 
| footing of a younger brother.  The conversation of Sir 
| George Savile, who is represented as a typical specimen 
| of those who live in the land of fashion, is perfectly in 
| character with his proceedings in general.  When he had 
| lodged Lionel in is brougham, and was driving him out 
| to meet Lord Carlisle, this was the style of his discourse:  
| ~~
| <q>
| <pb n="306">
| </q>
| All of which things are exactly what a <p> "man of the 
| world," </p> belonging to <p> "the land of fashion," 
| </p> would say to a youth whom he had picked up in 
| the street and never seen before.  But London appears 
| to have a strange power of bringing on these paroxysms 
| of fine writing to which Mr. Colburn Mayne is so 
| deplorable a victim.  A kind of prose ode to Piccadilly 
| and Buckingham Palace is one of the severest cases of 
| the malady we have ever met:  ~~
| <q> </q>
| Surely even the National Gallery may take heart now, 
| and hope to find its poet yet, if Buckingham Palace has 
| lived to be likened to a palace of Arabian story.  
| Perhaps we may even be permitted to see the day when 
| universal rehabilitation shall have been accomplished, 
| and enthusiastic admirers shall descant on the poetry of 
| the Brompton Boilers.
| If any chemical process existed by which all this 
| vaporous bombast could be distilled out of its style, 
| <hi rend="italic"> Which does she Love? </hi> would not 
| be an uninteresting novel.  As a tale of mere incident, 
| without pretending to any delicate portraiture of 
| character, it would not be without attraction, if only it 
| were possible, even for a chapter, to conclude a truce 
| with the fine writing.  But there is no escape from it.  
| The passionate lovers, and the philosophic friends, and 
| the cruel stepmother, and the affectionate mother ~~ all 
| of them talk with the full consciousness that the 
| reporters are in the gallery.  And the author himself is 
| more difficult to endure than all his characters put 
| together.  For fear the moral of his fiction should not be 
| apprehended at once by his younger readers, he is 
| careful to point it out at every convenient interval, and, 
| when he thinks it particularly striking, to improve it by 
| preaching upon things in general.  A Greek chorus, 
| suddenly smitten with a taste for grandiose twaddle, is 
| the ideal pattern he appears to have set himself to copy.  
| There is only one chance for his cure.  He must get rid 
| of the extravasated oratory that presses on the brain, by 
| some more natural channel.  He loves London dearly.  
| If he could only induce London to return the 
| compliment, and invest him with that chartered right of 
| spouting which resides in the dignity of a Metropolitan 
| Member, he might yet be healed.  Then, in frequent 
| addresses to his constituents, he could throw off that 
| morbid secretion of fine phrases with which he is now 
| afflicted.  It will be in our power then to judge fairly of 
| his story-telling capabilities, which may very likely be 
| found to be far greater than, in their present disguise, it 
| is possible to suspect.  If he does adopt the healing 
| process we have recommended, and becomes a 
| candidate for the representation of princely Piccadilly, 
| he will probably find that he can transfer most of the 
| choice passages in this book to his electioneering 
| speeches, and be sure of an appreciative audience.  
| Only there is one feature which he must be content to 
| suppress.  For the last twenty years the land has been 
| sorely plagued with the religious novel.  But now a 
| worse pest has come upon us, in the shape of an 
| irreligious novel.  Denunciation of the principal 
| doctrines of Christianity, and of those who preach them, 
| has become as favourite a condiment for spicing an 
| insipid dialogue as eulogy of religious ritualism used to 
| be in years gone by.  Founding an argument against real 
| opinions upon facts avowedly fictitious, is in any case 
| as bold an affront to common sense as can well be 
| conceived.  But the character of the proceeding varies 
| considerably with the gravity of the opinions discussed.  
| The author may safely count upon disgusting all to 
| whom he addresses himself if he goes on interpolating 
| into the intervals of a fictitious story polemical 
| arguments upon the gravest controversy upon which 
| human beings can enter.