• Women take the truth as already found; men go in pursuit of it.' Their psychic atavism' tends to repose; their absorption in the single case, their attachment to the individual, and the coloured lens of affectability' through which they look at most things, make them strikingly unfit to discourse in the abstract of justice, equity, and indifferent law. The woman, not unlike the artist, has deep and direct impressions which lay hold of her to the exclusion of others, while they last. But except in the rare instance, which is not always the agreeable one, she cannot rise from particulars to a general view. And hence, did we trust the witches in questions of divinity, we should find ourselves, at best, in a luminous cloud. Their inspiration is a heightened feeling; they deal with familiar spirits, and would fain reduce the supernatural to an affair of the heart. 'Even in trivial matters,' remarks Mr. Ellis, the average woman more easily accepts statements and opinions than a man'; she will die for a dogma, when put forward with such authority and unction that her emotional nature is sufficiently thrilled.' Like children, they feel the heroism of the unaccountable instinct of self-sacrifice far earlier and more keenly than they appreciate the sublimity of truth.' To be vividly impressed by immediate facts, neglecting the distant and the past; to crave sympathy, and long after self-sacrifice; to yield, as it were, by instinct, to the conventional; to bow under the yoke of fashion without a protest, and in deference merely to its changes at once to put aside the beautiful for the ugly, the refined and becoming for that which disfigures and distorts, all this may be traced back by the philosopher to the special organism of which it does but express some particular demand; but to high abstract thought it must needs be fatal.

Throughout The Heavenly Twins' we discern fresh illustrations of the truth which Aurora Leigh' has charmingly versified :

"Your quick-breathed hearts,

So sympathetic to the personal pang,

Close on each separate knife-stroke, yielding up

A whole life at each wound, incapable

Of deepening, widening a large lap of life

To hold the world-full woe.'

The great sum of universal anguish' that has driven many a man into Pessimism will leave most women cold. Nor has it deeply coloured this story. But the individual instance,— what copious description it brings forth! The spirit of selfsacrifice, again, rules in this dark world like a sun. Every woman has a fillet round her brows: old Mrs. Frayling is

Hecuba,

Hecuba, not snarling dog-like, but whining pitifully; Edith resembles Polyxena sacrificed to the blood-drinking demon, Achilles; Evadne, rescued at the last moment by Dr. Galbraith, is first cousin to Iphigenia in Aulis; and Artemis-Angelica has stooped to her shepherd in Latmos;-she will bear the wound of that memory inside her hunting-dress as long as she lives. Of feeling, passionate or tearful, rebellious, unmanageable, and seeking relief in paroxysms, every other page bears the tokens; but sublime thought, a religion which may be construed, or even a distinct policy in the question wherewith this author professes to busy herself, are not matters of feeling, and we lay the volume down as we took it up, still wondering that the woman, in a Hansard-like flood of eloquence, can nowhere state her case clearly enough for the jury of reason to decide upon it.

But the New Woman cannot escape economics, any more than she is willing to dispense with a rational dress in favour of the undivided cylinder,' or grandmother's petticoat, which she once wore contentedly. And as, like other abstractions, she is not to be found complete and realized in one individual,—as she ranges from grave to gay, from lively to severe, it is the novelist's duty to sketch her in all her varying aspects. There is a type much closer to life than the grotesques and caricatures of The Heavenly Twins,' and the author of Robert Elsmere' has given it to the world in a brilliant, half-serious, halfsatirical fashion, naming it Marcella.' Those who have lost themselves in Mrs. Grand's sea of moving wax, where the story does not march but only welters round its disjointed personages, will break out into vehement praise on turning to the transparent colours, the crisp dialogue, the distinctly painted figures, and the style, as keen as it is light and sparkling, of a volume which shows Mrs. Humphry Ward at her best. Not that 'Marcella' is so perfect as the art of blotting could have given it us. If the characters of 'The Heavenly Twins' do not move at all, those which Mrs. Ward has called out on her stage can hardly be persuaded to go off again. It is worth noting how, in her three so widely advertised and successful stories, Mrs. Ward has not once ended at the psychological moment. She lingers with a superfluous book, plays out the tricks when we know them all, registers the obvious threevolume gambit, and sings her swan-song, not unmusically, to an audience that is looking for its wrappers and great coats. The effect is certainly marred; but no additions, however tiresome, can do it away. Marcella' is still the platonic exemplar of a circulating novel, composed, alas! not for all time but for

a season;

a season; it is surface-painting which has no great depth,echoes skilfully rendered of discussions, talk, reading, of the thousand and one things that make the current of society-life, with a background of so-called opinions to subdue its frivolity and its fashion. But the touch and the make-up are, in their kind, admirable. Women, it is agreed on all hands, excel in fiction. We hasten to explain our meaning, which is not that of Lombroso, who lays down that in the female sex deception is almost an organic aptitude. What we have in view is the slightly dream-like reproduction of emotion and character, the fanciful version of things, made credible to others by strokes of detail, in which women have found a means of expression well within their grasp. They observe minute traits of conduct; they spy unconsciously upon the men their masters, and learn the signals which betoken storm or sunshine; while uttering their smooth, Evadne-phrases, they are drawing conclusions and moving to the point of assault. When a woman sits down to write a story, she is exercising the same kind of faculties that enable her to overcome mere strength by delicacy of interpretation and natural tact; she has but to throw her feelings upon paper, to describe the scenes which she habitually notes in her thoughts, and, unless her style and education have been wholly neglected, she will produce the outline of a readable fiction.

Marcella,' we need not not say, is much more. It is a genuine work of art, rising in one scene at least to the height and the beauty of a poem-that daring yet finely-wrought situation in the library, when love and moonlight, treason and the distant view of murder, and the playing at passion into which fire seems to be stealing as the play goes on, are thrown into a framework that makes the whole as detachable as it is arresting.

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Mrs. Humphry Ward knows her feminine chess, and practises the game with subtle power. It is an ancient but fascinating problem, Marcella to play and mate in three moves.' The opening, in which we are introduced to Raeburn, the chivalrous and strong, might perhaps be summed up as the knight's gambit. And if the New Woman were consulted, she would undoubtedly suggest as a novel but appropriate ending, 'Queen castles and takes knight.' The wedding ought to be a surrender on the part of the bridegroom, condemned henceforth to do his lady's will, to see with her eyes, and let her govern while he pretends to reign-' delicias hominis!' That, however, is not the philosophy of Marcella's biographer, to whom an equality of the sexes in this large revolutionary sense appears to be impossible. The knight, by sheer force of character, takes the queen, compelling her to own that he is Vol. 179.-No. 358.

X

worthy

worthy of her obedience as well as her love; that a woman may ask forgiveness on her knees from the man she has wronged, and may rise to a life which shall be all the nobler in that weakness is overcome by frank acknowledgment. Man triumphs, but only to set his partner on a throne.

Not being original enough to invent a religion, much less a system of economics, Marcella, who is a bright imitative girl, nervously eloquent, and striking in her dramatic postures, was made to be the exponent of views which gave to these personal advantages a setting beyond the common. Unlike Evadne, she did not exhaust encyclopædias in her youth; she never had a particle of industry or method; and her interest in Mr. Ellerton's sermons had been as strictly self-regarding as the enthusiasm with which she took up the Socialist propaganda, meaning to attain a high place in the movement. Her politics were guided by 'violent hearsays'; and though nourished on Karl Marx and Lassalle, a haze, which the historian of the damsel never quite succeeds in scattering, clouds the statement of Marcella's opinions. They were, in fact, little better than the 'imaginative intrigue' which had occupied her fancy and given a scope to her affections at school. The daughter and heir of a discredited gentleman, a black sheep in his own class, who comes into an embarrassed property, she finds that pretty things and old associations have their charm. The instinct of aristocracy wakes up; she aspires to be the Lady Bountiful of her village; and in a dream of great houses, family portraits, tapestries and heirlooms, of bric-a-brac, the peerage, and forty thousand a year, she engages herself to Mr. Raeburn, who will one day be the 'titled coronet' of American millionaire ambition. Of course she proposes to live quite simply' in Mayfair, with a carriage and two thousand pounds per annum at her disposal. We think with a smile of Marianne Dashwood. But she does not care the value of a Social Democratic leaflet for the young man himself, and she insists on a Magna Charta and Bill of Rights which he meekly signs, leaving her free to attend any one's meetings except his own, and to vote against him at the Board of Guardians. Perhaps we have not rehearsed the stipulations of that remarkable protocol quite accurately; but to this complexion it must have come, had not the second gentleman walked forward to the footlights. His name was Wharton, and, much as we dislike him, it must be admitted that he is the hero of this bold adventure.

Women are certainly more unrestrained than men, if once they have passed the Rubicon. Would Thackeray, who knew his Paris, have dared to write the French scenes in David Grieve'?

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6

Grieve'? We all remember his apologies for Pendennis-that harmless youth who fell in love and out again with the scarcely more innocent Fanny in the Temple Gardens. But Mrs. Ward is one of a new group of female novelists, ranging from Miss George Egerton to the powerful historian who has recounted 'The Wages of Sin,' and their distinguishing mark is by no means that unnatural habit of reticence' which Dr. Galbraith endeavoured to correct in his Evadne. We are told of Mr. Hamilton-Wells, the empty pageant who served as a father to the Twins, that he never quite knew what not to say.' Have these women of genius solved the problem? In Mrs. Grand's hurricane of words, how many there are which flash and startle, like gleams of forked lightning followed by thunder! They smell of sulphur, and are as little framed for delight as the reports in a medical journal. Marcella' does not fill the air with these fumes and vapours. She has come forth from a school of literature, not of medicine; but the literature is the latest French. Wharton, at all events, would find himself at home, much more easily than the virtuous David, with the persons and the style of M. Alphonse Daudet, rather than among the characters drawn in our native fiction by the masters. His reflections, soliloquies, and cynicisms, printed by the New Woman, and read by her daughters, breathe a decadent perfume, which the complex self-indulgence of his hedonist and egoist philosophy heightens to a rare degree. The man is wholly perverse, but on principle-an arrangement which would have satisfied Baudelaire, and is better known in Paris coteries than in London clubs. My mother,' says Wharton, by way of explanation, taught me to see everything dramatically.' It is needless to observe that no British female could have imagined this theatrical idea, not to speak of applying it. However, the consequence is that he amuses himself with the 'great tragi-comedy of the working-class movement,' because it is the part in life that brings him most thrill. He is a perfect dilettante-too perfect, indeed, since at the very height and crisis of feeling he remembers, nay he quotes to himself, the names of Alfred de Musset and George Sand, with an unconscious pedantry, traceable, as is clear, to Mrs. Ward's reading, and not to anything real in Wharton. This, perhaps, is the most decided instance of a lapse from her artistic self-control which can be charged to the author. In general, she lets the characters speak for themselves; and they do so with point.

But the French combination of action and sentiment, the sensuous introspection, the careful Epicurean tasting of life's flavours, and the doctrine of 'thrill,' which make Wharton a