THE GENERATION OF GENTLEFOLK

BOOKS OF THE DAY

By HAMISH MILES IN stout wooden boxes with japanned metal hasps, they were trundled by horse-van from Mr. Mudie's to the nicer homes of London ; and all over the country they were met at railway- stations and driven home by grooms, coachmen, or the other appropriate menials of a convenient age. They were generally in three volume form and priced at a guinea and a half, spaciously set out upon the page, soberly bound, and often provided with an alternative title preceded with a resonant " Or," which usually seemed to crystallise some moral implica- tion of the story.

They were, in fact, the rank-and-file novels of the Victorian Age, written by gentlepeople, for gentlepeople, about gentle- people. Some of them transcended their original caste limita- tions, became immensely popular, and passed into commoner clothing at • cheap; and then cheaper, prices ; but seldom, if ever, did this have a vulgarising effect on their authors or authoresses. Tone, expression, setting, and morality all remained indubitably correct, and in their myriad pages, by now yellow at the edges, are embalmed the lineaments of a particular class in a particular age. With the patience of what must be a deep affection, Miss E. M. Delafield has read the unread, made various and genial selections, and served them up with comment

and exposition to illustrate " the contemporary outlook in the mid- and late-Victorian Pnglish middle-class home." For this labour she 'deserves our gratitude. Her book sent me to the

London Library to explore for myself a few of the many metal shelves which there preserve the Yonges, the Wetherells, the Farrars, the Aguilars, the Sewells, the Broughtons, the Mathers. In quite a few minutes I realised that most con- temporary readers would as soon start on Le Grand Cyrus as on this school (or ladies' academy) of fiction in bulk. There is no need for intellectual pride about it : our own age has produced, is producing, its own monuments of papier-mdchi for the amused curiosity of 2037. But there is no escaping the fact that these minor Victorians can by now appeal only to the thesis-writer, as having primarily a documentary interest. To read them in any quantity would be like having a meal of calf's-foot jelly : sustaining, no doubt, but—.

Miss Delafield has concentrated, as she -admits, on the vast corpus of the novels of Charlotte M. Yonge, but she admits a few other writers, nearly all women, to her gallery. And after due allowance is made for the individual colouring of Miss Yonge's tastes and temper (easy circumstances and an impeccably Broad Church outlook), her writings may certainly be taken as fairly representative of the life and ideas of the class which they portray. Between 1848 and 1892—the years of her main activity—Miss Yonge produced one hundred and twelve volumes, the most far-famed of which was, of course, The Heir of Redclyffe (1853). From the best of these, and with corroborative samples from such novelists as Elizabeth Wetherell, Julia Horatia Ewing, F. W. Farrar, Annie Keary, E. Stuart Phelps, or Helen B. Mathers, she presents her composite picture.

Take a specimen. It comes from The Heir of Redclyffe, and is a fragment, no more, of Guy Morville's proposal to Amy Edmonstone. With a " long trailing branch of Noisette rose " twisted nervously in his hand, Guy has been orating for some time : " Amy's impulse was that anything shared with him would be welcome ; but the strength of the feeling stifled the power of

expression, and she could not utter a word. • Ladies and Gentlemen in Victorian Fiction. By B. M.

Delafield. (Hogarth 6d.) - • . • . " It seems selfish even to dream of it,' he proceeded, yet I must—I cannot help it. To feel that I had your love to keep me safe, to know that you watched for me, were my own, my Verena- oh, Amy ! it would be more joy than I have ever dared to hope for. But mind,' he added, after another brief pause, ' I would not even ask you to answer me now, far less to bind yourself, even if—if it were possible. I know my trial is not come; were I to render myself, by positive act, unworthy even to thik of you, it would be too dreadful to have entangled you, to have made you unhappy. No. I speak now, beCause I ought not to remain here with such feelings unknown to your father and mother.' " At that moment, close on the other side of the box-tree clump, were heard the wheels of Charles's garden chair. . . . Amy flew off, like a little bird to its nest, and never stopped till, breathless and crimson, she darted into the dressing-room, threw herself on her knees, and with her face hidden in her mother's lap, exclaimed, in panting, half-smothered whispers, which needed all Mrs. Edmon- stone's intuition to make them intelligible : " 0 mamma, mamma, he says—he says he loves me ' " Or another, of schoolboy sensiblerie this tithe, from Dean Farrar's astounding Eric, or Little by Little (1858). The scene is the school infirmary, and the injured Russell is being visited by Eric and another of his friends :

. . . There he lay, so calm, and weak, and still, with his bright

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earnest eyes turned towards them, as though to see whether any of their affection for hint had ceased or been forgotten.

" In an instant they were kneeling in silence by the bed with bowed foreheads, and the sick boy tenderly put his hands on their heads, and pushed the frail white forgers through their hair, and looked at them tearfully without a word, till they hid their faces with their hands and broke into deep suppressed sobs of compassion.

" Oh, hush, hush 1 ' he said, as he felt their tears dropping on his hands while they kissed them ; dear Eric, dear Monty, why should you cry so for me ? I am very happy."

As we breathe this close, honeyed air, we arc bound to ask what relation there really is between the artistic convention and the actual life of the time. And this leads to a doubt as to how far these novelists can be taken as truly portraying the life of their day. After all, we can read Trollope or Surtees, or look through Punch when John Leech and Charles Keane were drawing, and get an approximate sense of reality about the

flesh-and-blood quality of our great-grandparents which is far more convincing. The truth is that the novelist, unless he be one of the masters, imposes too much of his own super- ficial mental habits to be a trustworthy interpreter to posterity.

Take a random instance from our own time. In The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence is showing us Ursula Brangwen and Skrebensky

together at an open-air dance :

" At the touch of her hand on his arm, his consciousness melted away from him. He took her into the sure, subtle power of his will, and they became one movement, dancing on the slippery grass. It would be endless, this movement, it would continue for ever. It was his will and her will locked in a trance of motion, two wills locked on one motion, yet never fusing, never yielding one to the other. It was a glaucous intertwining, delicious flux and contest in flux."

If our great-grandchildren draw conclusions about us from these locked trances and glaucous fluxes, will they be right ? However, Miss Delafield has given us a book of select and agreeable curios, and taken the dust off them with amusing flicks of her feather-brush. The subject-matter is neatly arranged under such heads as " Papa and Mama," " Is This

a Party of Pleasure ? " " Only the Governess," or " Enjoying Ill-Health," and the extracts are generally long enough to do fair justice to the author's intentions. A dozen typical illus- trations in the mode of the time (though unrelated to the text) provide a polite visual background. All in all, the book_, makes jumpy reading, but it is pleasant trowsing, and con-

noisseurs will enjoy its evocation of 1865 and All That.