CORRESPONDEN CE.
A COMMENTARY IN AN EASY-CHAIR: io,f,cossroxs ON LITERATURE-CANDOUR IN FICTION-THE MORALS OF ENGLISH SOCIETY-MR. GLADSTONE AND THE LAST TWO HUNDRED YEARS.
I WONDER whether the discussion of purely literary subjects has really the interest for the general public which it is supposed to have, or if other people besides those who are in some way mixed up with the pursuits of the literary profession feel any actual interest in such questions as that of Candour in Fiction, Success in Fiction, the means of getting on as a Novelist, and so forth—which are subjects upon which their entertainers in the lighter branches of literature are so continually endeavouring to enlighten them. There is nothing at least like repetition for impressing the popular mind, and subjects of this sort are easy to descant upon. When a man is so kind as to tell us how he works at his trade—as M. Daudet does, for instance—how he is helped by his charming wife, and how his delightful little boy carries the sheets from one to the other, the public, which loves a
virtuous domestic interior even in France, where there is no fear of that Young Person whom British novelists fear yet cherish—is enchanted. They like to see the industry going on. They also like to see how nails are made, and other kinds of manufacture. Perhaps it is not necessary to demand higher motives. But it is curious to see the persistence with which English writers return to the attack, and endeavour to repre- sent the one point of originality in English fiction, which distinguishes it in the world, as its weakness. Even Mr. Besant, who is by way of taking the side of purity, supports it rather upon the argument that nothing else will pay, than on any higher. And a very fine thing it is to be said for us, if it is true, that nothing else will pay. I remember, however, on the other hand, to have heard not so many years ago of a poor lady who has written a great many books, some of them of the character which enlightened persons call "risky," and who declared in her own defence that she did this because nothing else would pay. So that even in this particular, opinions differ. I should like to know, however, what Mr. Hardy, for instance, would like to write that would outdo the grotesque indecency of the turning-point of a story of his which he calls "Two on a Tower." The expedient by which his heroine secures a father for her child is certainly as free as anything in French fiction, if it were not so irresistibly comic by reason of the desperate British snatch at propriety with which that freedom is combined. But I do not know where our novelists are to get the nastiness which they are so anxious to bring into our books. In ordinary life, they tell us, people do not commit murder or forge wills, but do break the Seventh Com- mandment. It may be so, in the froth of society. That it is so on the broader level of English life, I do not believe.
It occurred to me lately to have a good many conversations with a very intelligent and brilliant Frenchwoman upon this subject. She began, needless to say, by a strenuous protest against the supposition that French novels gave any sort of real representation of French life,—an opinion which I have always held, partly because I have no belief in the possibility of universal corruption, and partly because domestic life in France has, as it happens, always appeared to me in a very attractive light. But in an uncontroversial moment, when she was thinking of no theory, my friend began to comment upon the behaviour of certain friends of hers in Paris, one of whom displayed a capacity to prendre son parti which kept her home intact, and procured her the approbation of all who knew her ; while another, unable to reach this height of virtue, could not prendre son parti at all, but took her troubles badly, and made her home miserable. It need scarcely be added that the misfortunes to which these ladies could and could not make up their minds were the infidelities of their husbands, and that the brave woman who did prendre son parti (to the general approbation) was by far the most deeply injured of the two. The expediency of making up one's mind to one's fate in this way was so strongly urged by the eloquent talker, as to show what a very real and urgent matter it was, according to her knowledge and experience. But I confess that the gravity of this startling view was neutralised to me by the fact that there sat by my side listening, an English lady, of very enlightened views indeed, exceedingly removed from that ideal of the British Matron against whom our novelists are so bitter ; and that the abso- lute and ludicrous absurdity of the supposition that this charming young woman should ever have to prendre son parti, so overwhelmed my sense of the ridiculous, that it was with difficulty I could listen with gravity to the impassioned plea for the forbearing wife which was being carried on. My English friend was deeply interested in the troubles of those poor ladies who had to prendre leur parti, far too much to contrast their position with her own. She for her part is not, I am sure, quite clear which is her John and which is herself in the one soul into which life and love has welded them, or which are his thoughts and which hers in their common stock ; and as for the possibility that one time or other it should fall to her lot to prendre son parti! —I repeat, it was so extremely ludicrous that my consternation over the other revelation was lost in the agitation of a laugh that dared not come.
I replied to ray French friend that the house in which we talked was on the edge of a little community of intelligent and highly educated people, chiefly in the prime of youth, or at least of life—some thirty or forty married pairs, well off, lively, pleasure-loving, in their way—full of life and activity : (I may -explain that it was close to one of the great Public Schools of England), and that in the course of twenty years during Nauch I had known that community, there had not arisen one case in which a wife had been called upon to prendre son parti, or in which any scandal, or ghost of a scandal, had arisen. Mademoiselle d'A— responded as a woman of politeness would. She could not refuse to believe what I told her; "but if I said so in France, they would laugh in my nose," she added, with a phraseology charmingly literal. Well ! Mrs. Lynn Linton and Mr. Hardy would probably find the condition of the poor ladies who were compelled to prendre leur parti much the most dramatic—not to speak of the captivating studies, on the other hand, of the ladies who gave them that parti to take. A story-teller, loving strong effects may be excused for finding the honest life tame; but this is not the influence of the Young Person or the British Matron : it is the level of English life.
I must add a delightful example of this wholesome and fragrant existence in the little inadvertent speech of another (female) member of a similar community, who was describing the ways of thinking aild feeling of a friend known to us both, whose sense of duty to her husband and children struck this gentle critic with a little chill in the midst of her approval. To require to think of so grave a motive seemed strange to my companion. "Why," she said, "I have been married a dozen years, and I never once thought of my duty !" Was there ever a more perfect gospel of true and spotless domestic life P I am thankful to think that this highest unconscious poetry is at the same time the commonplace of existence in the great mass of that higher middle class in whom both fiction and biography find their chief subjects, and in many of the highest, and also many of the lower strata. The scum and the froth now as ever come uppermost, and lay their unsavoury deposit out upon the surface, which our novelists would like, it appears, to rake together, and serve up—in locked bookcases. It appears to me that the idea of mature men and women retiring to their private apartments, and opening their secret cupboards in order to read nasty stories, is about the most noisome sug- gestion I have ever heard. The Young Person, Mrs. Lynn Linton advises, should be left free to the society of Jane Austen, Walter Scott, and a few other proper writers. Happy Young Person ! She will have much the best of it. I would rather spend my leisure hours with her than with her middle- aged uncle, reading Zola or Guy de Maupassant in the sacred seclusion of the smoking-room at the club : or with her elderly aunt who keeps the drawer locked in which her yellow- backed novels live. As for Balzae, does not the English novelist of the day know that in France that great romancer is out of date P—assommant, as a French critic informed me not long ago P Certainly these are strange things to be said of English literature. And when the veteran of many fights, the master of every subject under heaven, takes a hand at this too .delightful (as it seems) subject of easy remark, even his erudition seems to fail him. Mr. Gladstone as a reviewer of novels may be left to the docile public which still takes his -advice on that subject at least ; but when he begins to talk of literary history, he must keep to his facts a little— which are things possibly not indispensable in politics, but strongly clamant in historical questions. Last week, no further gone, from the height of that universal chairmanship of things in general which he has assumed, Mr. Glad- stone was good enough to tell us that for two hundred years before Wordsworth there was a blank in poetical literature. Rash was the statement as ever man made, and easy to be disposed of, as are now, alas ! many of the statements of Mr. Gladstone. We recommend to him a brief biographical dictionary by Mr. Hole, which we have found of great use when about to commit ourselves on such subjects. There he will find that a not unknown person called John Milton flourished within his two hundred years, that another named John Dryden, and a certain Alexander Pope, and towards the end William Cowper and Robert Burns lived and died within their round. Not inconsiderable names perhaps, and making, indeed, something of "a blank" when they are withdrawn. But I hope that Mr. Gladstone will reconsider his sweeping decision, and allow them to remain.
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