now to recite the history of Tannith and Mylitta for the benefit of the Heavenly Twins? We shall do no such thing. But the feminine of anthropomorphism is a detestable superstition which the world, if unhappily these goddesses come out of their winding-sheets again, will discover to be a grand name for hysteria, convulsions, and an hypnotic Aphrodite.

But moods are variable, and the significance of inarticulate music lies in the ear of the listener. Feeling is all,' says Faust to Marguerite;' names are sound and smoke clouding the fire of Heaven.' And so this emotional volume, with its parade of cool science, takes on the colours of the dove's neck, glistening with gold or darkening into sable, with no more logic than the momentary illusion can suggest. Now it is satirical and bitter, now atheistic, and in a few more turns pious and prayerful. The author may describe meltingly, and condemn unsparingly, the delicious sensations' to which Edith in ecstatic contemplation yields on her knees. She may gird at the young clergyman's idea of worship as a 'refinement of pleasure,' and laugh to scorn the sedatives of spiritual consolation' which pulpit eloquence holds out to women. But elsewhere, when Evadne is arguing her case with Mrs. Orton Beg, this admirable précieuse informs us, 'By experience I mean the addition of some personal feeling to our knowledge.' If that be so, why may we not add such feeling to religious knowledge, and so gain the very highest experience? Because, the answer is, when we search into the heart of the mystery, religion is already feeling, and is never knowledge. We cannot know for certain that He watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps.' Whether even there be any one to watch, who shall say? The chime is an aspiration, a question, a doubt, or a figure of speech; to the New Woman it is never a dogma, for in the Christian sense of the word she believes nothing; her comfort is to be well instructed regarding the lobes of the brain and the processes of digestion. But one thing she insists upon; she will not have our sacred humanity' blasphemed. And a second thing is dear to her, its assured perfectibility. The chief and great hindrance to that consummation, the stone of stumbling and rock of offence, is man; it is Colonel Colquhoun and Major Menteith; it is the Duke, once gay and blamable, now a builder of cathedrals; it is the Reverend Mr. St. John with his sedatives, and Father Ricardo with his anile superstitions. The priest and the soldier, the doting peer and the clergyman of consumptive charm, must be reformed altogether, if the society of which they now represent the conscience, the force, and the order, is to march towards the New Jerusalem.

But

But the principle of a genuine reform,-what is it? 'Equality' cries Olympe de Gouges. The acknowledged supremacy of woman,' says Mrs. Sarah Grand, loftily correcting her. And the new government is to be furnished with sanctions like the old. Doubtless in the good time coming,' remarks our novelist pleasantly, all estimable wives will subscribe to keep up asylums to which their husbands can be quietly removed for treatment, so soon after the honeymoon as their manners show signs of deterioration.' This, of course, we know is mere joking, but it is really tremendous. The lethal chamber for lost dogs is a trifle in comparison. An estimable Angelina despatching Edwin to the company of his mates in misfortune would eclipse in the terror of her aspect even Mrs. Guthrie Brimstone when she flaps her nostrils,' whatever that process may be. Hitherto, the monstrous regiment of woman,' as John Knox politely termed it, has been exercised with discretion, not always in the view of the trembling male. "The sight of a gay ribbon or the prospect of a new bonnet,' we are told in The Strike of a Sex,' has been sufficient to divert woman from any such vagary' as her imagined rights. In some cases, chiefly American, it would even seem that her 'vaulting social ambition was preternaturally active in seeking and buying, through marriage, the titled coronets of a profligate and imbecile nobility.' But these fantastically dressed puppets' are no longer to give their warped and distorted exhibitions.' The tinsel stars in that firmament' must come down from their painted sky; the drawing-room in which she submitted to be cajoled and wheedled by any trifles' will cease to be 'woman's sphere,' but, en revanche, she will undertake to preach, to exhort, to dissect, to vote, to sit in the jury-box, and to be married as often and as long as she pleases. Mrs. Grand does not raise the question of unlimited divorce and free union; but the ghost which she endeavours to keep behind the scene peeps out through the curtains, and we catch his cynical or lugubrious 'asides' while the noisy tambourine-playing of the Heavenly Twins is going forward in front of the stage. For Evadne and Colonel Colquhoun, Edith and her Major, Angelica and Mr. Kilroy, were all 'incompatibles.' None of these marriages were made in heaven; why should they not be dissolved?

It must be, after all, la pruderie anglaise which has cut short Mrs. Grand's argument in the middle, and ruined her story. The scientific Evadne went too far, unless she intended to go a long way farther. Angelica was bound, on her own principles, to exchange the husband whom she never did love for the Tenor in whose presence she had found her true self. And

why

why must that exquisite spirit be denied its reward? Because the capricious Rosalind had chosen to marry before meeting him? Is then a promise,-a contract, though 'blinding and stifling,' like that which Evadne was weak enough to enter into with the Colonel, always sacred? 'When one has a husband, one must be loyal to him,' says Angelica; nor did she think it hard, for I could not under any circumstances do anything morally wrong,' observes the modest creature, being, as is evident, confirmed in grace and impeccable. But such paragons of virtue, 'perfect women in a perfect world,' do not commonly frequent the regions of scientific realism which we are now exploring. This unimpeachable Mignon, who breaks bounds at night and dares the police and the perils of a Cathedral close, bears no small resemblance to Dodo, with virtue added. Would not so flighty a temper, trained by itself to Epicurean notions of the Highest Good, often leave out the virtue, as an ingredient which spoils the cup of pleasantness? Why be ascetic at the expense of your creed? But Angelica preferred the attractions of art to those of passion; all she wanted was 'latitude for her individuality,'—which, as the story proves, she already enjoyed,

and so she broke down conventional obstacles,' but was provided by her thoughtful creator with an Orlando who, being the one sincere Christian in the book, was sure to behave like a saint and a gentleman. And this, we are to understand, is scientific realism! What an argument ad hominem against Ideala! Could she not trust her agnostic friends?

Evadne, unlike the Heavenly Twin, does not regard her promise as given. When that absurd figure, the second Mrs. Nickleby, whose daughter she is, quotes Bible and Prayer Book, the rules of good society and the marriage-service, her young lioness replies that she is not bound to Colonel Colquhoun and will not go back to him. Why, then, did she go back? Was not her return a 'silent abject submission to vice,' such as patient Grizzel might have commended? Had she not taught her aunt in Scriptural language, that the consequences become hereditary, and continue from generation to generation'? But, alas for the strong woman's consistency! was sacrificed; or rather, both were offered up as a holocaust to these moral axiors imperfectly fulfilled. The Colonel sought solace in drink, Monte Carlo, and visions of sin. His ostensible wife became a wax doll sitting at the western window, sewing and dreaming, with interludes of madness, consequent on the neurasthenia from which she suffered. But she, too, was no less impeccable than pedantic. She never thought of marrying Dr. Galbraith until her legal partner had expired

Evadne

of

of some cardiac affection, leaving the doctor and his patient free to indulge their own. This delightful Platonic romance ought to have been called 'Pamela, or Virtue rewarded in the New Woman.' Yet, we ask again, why did she, in the eyes of the world, forgive the culprit, instead of holding up to him a standard of excellence? She had read, in her Darwin, how the Argus pheasant puts on his beautiful feathers at the bidding of his æsthetic mate; and her duty manifestly was to insist on the production of a similar pattern in others by making an example of Colonel Colquhoun. But the author felt that a consistent Evadne would have taken her first marriage to be null and void, dismissing the offender with a caution. She would have looked round at once for some Galbraith on whom to bestow her hand, so soon as he could satisfy her touching his unblemished personal conduct, and ancestral clean bills during the last three or four centuries. To promote, in her own person, the doctrine of liberty would have been logical; but she never could have ventured so far without losing caste.

Evadne was bound, as she well knew from her pathology and therapeutics, to make herself acquainted with the past before wedding the present of Colonel Colquhoun. Let her never dream of pleading infancy and beautiful ignorance. A girl who in the intervals of lawn-tennis and court dresses had mastered half-a-dozen sciences and the modern writers, should have been capable of imitating at least the uneducated Clarissa, and making her inclinations wait upon her reason. But no, she falls most unscientifically in love, marries in haste, and repents at leisure. She saw no reason why marriage should be a lottery, but she thrusts in her hand as soon as the fatal urn is held out. Her mind is constructed in sections, which enable her to write alternate substantives and adjectives of an incompatible sort. Her character is made in pieces, like a Japanese house bought at the toy-shop; it has sliding panels, one Christian, the other heathen, and they move in and out with a disregard of the reader's comfort which is always perplexing, but in the 'Impressions of Dr. Galbraith' becomes, we had almost said, ridiculous. Her principles are mixed; she is commonplace and criminal (at least in imagination), enthusiastic one moment, wooden the next, a pattern of propriety eschewing emotion, and yet all along convinced that her bold renunciation of the Colonel was right, and persisting in keeping him at a distance. Does the author intend a sly stroke at the English spirit of compromise? But only in virtue of such compromise would her great book hold together for an instant. Fancy the good-humoured laugh of Madame Sand, had she been worthy to

read

read these pages; her amusement, not unmixed with wonder, at an Evadne, an Ideala, whose principles allowed them a freedom which they were too demure and British to take. 'Quelle innocence, mon Dieu!' the good George would have exclaimed, as she put the story from her, adding, perhaps, in a musing tone, 'Mais, si c'était de l'hypocrisie, tout de même?' Now, the touching and comic thing is that it was innocence and not hypocrisy, the attempt at a juste milieu which in us islanders is so perplexing to the French mind.

6

Mrs. Grand dares any man to dictate what the sex shall do or not do, say, or practise. The Church is a masculine organization,' and therefore, as a guide, incompetent. For religion, we must look to Ideala, when, discarding the man-made gauds of sensuous service,' and 'lost in thought,' with her eyes on the floor, she announces that it will be neither a political institution nor a means of livelihood,' but something about which there can be no doubt, and consequently no dispute,' though offering delights of a nature too delicate to be appreciated by uncultured palates.' And these 'infinite truths, known to Buddha, reflected by Plato, preached by Christ,' are apparently so clear and simple that the Pythoness refrains from specifying any one of them in detail. Again we think of Mr. Casaubon and the Key to all Mythologies.' How easy to compress your Platos and your Buddhas, your Hindus and Athenians, within a sentence; but how indiscriminate, how bewildering to the pitiful male monster, lean with long studies, and painfully aware that only a soaring genius like Victor Hugo can grasp and convey a system in the mere recitation of its founder's name! Happy Ideala, whose cultured palate detects the flavour of Buddhism in Attic sauces! She can sum up the New Testament also ; and the Twins, not to be less advanced, take their courteous pleasure in showing the gentleman set over them that he has never rightly understood the Old. Their youthful fancy perceives contradictions everywhere in the sacred writers; and its boisterous or even vulgar romping seems to Mrs. Grand equivalent to a criticism of life and doctrine.

But must we put these things to a plain test? For one wizard there shall be fifty witches,' said Jean Bodin, who in this province was an authority. If religion were the same thing as enthusiasm, women might have made it a feminine organization. But definite truths, set ordinances, and a moral code, have always entered into the idea of religion as Christians conceive of it. And to what degree have women furnished these elements? Burdach says of them, not without warrant, 'Women