Clara Helen Whitmore

“ No writer since Congreve has so many sparkling lines. She has been likened to Horace, and if we compare her wit with that of Thackeray, who by the way ridiculed her in his Novels by Eminent Hands, her humour has qualities of old Falernian, beside which his too frequently has the bitter flavour of old English beer. The Englishman is inclined to take his wit, like his sports, too seriously, and to mingle with it a little of the spice of envy. Mrs. Gore has none of this, however, and skims along the surface of fashionable life with a grace and ease and humour extremely diverting. ”

“ Lucy Snowe, the English teacher in Villette, is far more pleasing than Jane Eyre; she is not so passionate, but her view of life is deeper and broader, and consequently kinder. And there is Paul Emanuel. Who would have believed the rejected professor would have grown into that scholar of middle age? He is so distinctly the foreigner in showing every emotion under which he is labouring. How pathetic and how lovable he is on the day of his fête when he thinks that the English governess has forgotten him, and has not brought even a flower to make the day happier for him! ”

“ Mary Barton is a work of genius. Only a woman of high ideals could have drawn the character of Margaret Hale, an earlier Marcella, or Molly Gibson, or Mr. Thornton, or Mr. Holman. Only a woman of deep insight could have created a woman like Ruth: a book which in its problem and its deep earnestness reminds one of Aurora Leigh. But her readers will always love Mrs. Gaskell for the sake of the gentle ladies of Cranford. ”

“ Her genius in this respect is different from that of other women novelists. She has made a series of snap-shots of people in the most absurd situations and ridicules them while she is taking the picture. Few women writers can resist the temptation of peeping into the hearts of their men and women, and the knowledge thus gained gives them sympathy, while it often detracts from the strong lines of the external picture; a writer will not paint a villain quite so black if he believes he still preserves some remnants of a noble nature. ”

“ It is a beautiful love story, but the hero and heroine were of too fine a fibre to stand alone against the world. After the death of Glenmurray, the interest flags. The conclusion is weak, not at all worthy of the beginning. Love of every variety has been the theme of poets and novelists, but there is no love story more beautiful for its self-sacrificing devotion to principle and to each other, than the few pages of this novel which tell of the unsanctioned married life of the high-minded idealist and his bride. ”

“ The life of the poor had often furnished a theme for the poets, but it was the life of shepherds and milkmaids, above whom the blue sky arched, and whose labours were brightened by the songs of the birds, and the colours and sweet odours of fruit and flowers. But Mrs. Gaskell described the life of the poor in a town where factory smoke obscured the light of the sun, and where the weariness of labour was rendered more intense by the clanging factory bell, and the constant whirr of machinery ringing in their ears. It is a gloomy picture, but no gloomier than the reality. ”

“ Only a woman's pen could have drawn such characters as Dinah Morris, Maggie Tulliver, and Dorothea Casaubon, or could have followed the minute and subtle influences under which the plot of Middlemarch is shaped. George Eliot has left a larger portrait gallery of women than any other novelist. Not only has she drawn different grades of society, but, what is perhaps a more difficult task, she has drawn the different grades of spiritual greatness and moral littleness. ”

“ But among the writers who, in the point which we have mentioned, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings. ”

“ Shirley [Pg 268] evidently expressed Charlotte's own views in the following words:
"If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women. They do not read them in a true light; they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. Then to hear them fall into ecstasies with each other's creations, worshipping the heroine of such a poem—novel—drama, thinking it fine,—divine! ”

“ As long as enthusiastic youth loves an unblemished hero, The Scottish Chiefs will be read. It is impossible to analyse these early impressions or to test their truth. One can only remember them with gratitude. Jane Porter has, however, taught the youth of other lands to reverence Scotland's popular hero, so that the mention of his name awakens a thrill of pleasure, and the hills and glades associated with his deeds glow with the light of romance. ”

“ Adeline is captivated by the enthusiastic ideals of the young author. There is a fine contrast in character and motive, where Adeline is entertaining Mr. Glenmurray, the high-minded writer, and Sir Patrick O'Carrol, a man of many gallantries. Sir Patrick is shocked to meet at her home the man whose theories have banished him from respectable society. Adeline, innocent of any low interpretation that may be put upon her words, makes the frank avowal that, in her opinion, marriage is a shameless tie, and that love and honour are all that should bind men and women. ”

“ It is a noteworthy fact that while Scott was casting over all Europe the light of romanticism, the women writers of the time, with but one or two exceptions, were viewing life with the clear vision of Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen, as if the world obtruded too glaringly upon their eyes to be lost sight of in happy day-dreams. ”

“ Like Balzac, like Tourgenieff at his best, Jane Austen gives the reader an impression of knowing everything there was to know about her creations, of being incapable of error as to their acts, thoughts, or emotions. She presents an absolute illusion of reality; she exhibits an art so consummate that we mistake it for [Pg 171] nature. She never mixes her own temperament with those of her characters, she is never swayed by them, she never loses for a moment her perfect, serene control of them. ”

“ The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft could fully sympathise with Beatrice. In the grief, almost madness, with which Beatrice realises her self-deception, there are traces of Frankenstein. Perhaps no problem plucked from the tree of good and evil was so ever-present to Mary Shelley as why misery so often follows an obedience to the highest dictates of the soul. Both her father and mother had experienced this; and she and Shelley had tasted of the same bitter fruit. In the analysis of Beatrice's emotions Mrs. Shelley shows herself akin to Charlotte Brontë. ”

“ This is partly due to the fact that nearly all the books on literature have been written from a man's stand-point. While in other arts the tastes of men and women vary little, the choice of novels is to a large degree determined by sex. Many men who acknowledge unhesitatingly that Jane Austen is superior as an artist to Smollett, will find more pleasure in the breezy adventures of Roderick Random than in the drawing-room atmosphere of Emma; while no woman can read a novel of Smollett's without loathing, although she must acknowledge that the Scottish writer is a man of genius. ”

“ But Charlotte Brontë, with a woman's sympathetic eye made doubly penetrating and loving by genius, chose this outcast from romance as a heroine, a woman without beauty or charm, and boldly proclaimed that moral beauty was superior to physical beauty, and that the attraction of one soul for another lay quite beyond the pale of external form. ”

“ And in the final outcome of the story, one can but hope that Catharine's restless spirit, as it watches and waits for Heathcliff, is striving to bring some blessing upon her house. The awakening of a better nature in Hareton, through his love for Catharine's daughter, is a pretty, tender idyl. The book is like a Greek tragedy in this, that at the close the atmosphere has been purged; the sun once more shines through the windows of Wuthering Heights; hatred is dead, and love reigns supreme. ”

“ Miss Austen's genius was but slowly recognised. Her first books were published in 1811, only three years before Waverley, and her last novels were published after it. Who will linger over the teacups while knights in armour are riding the streets without? It is not until the cavalcade has passed that home seems again a quiet, refreshing spot. So the public, tired of the brilliant scenes and conflicting passions of other novels, has in the last few years turned back to the simple, wholesome stories of Jane Austen. ”

“ Gaskell were writing realistic novels, romantic fiction found noble exponents in the Brontë sisters.
The quiet life lived by the Brontës in the vicarage on the edge of the village of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire seems prosaic to the casual observer, but it had many weird elements of romanticism. The purple moors stretching away behind the grey stone vicarage, the grey sky, and the sun always half-frowning, and never sporting with nature here as it does over the mountains in Westmoreland, make thought earnest and deep, and suggest the mystery which surrounds human life. ”

“ But Catharine is married to Edgar, and for three years her better nature triumphs. Heathcliff is away; Edgar Linton loves her truly, and their home is happy. Catharine alone knows that that house is not her true place of abode. She alone knows that Edgar has not touched her inner nature. She knows that her real self, the self that must abide through the centuries, is indissolubly linked with another's. And when Heathcliff returns, the intensity of her joy, her almost unearthly delight, she neither can nor attempts to conceal. Not once is she deceived as to his true nature. ”

“ But not so with Maria Edgeworth. Her family, although originally English, had been settled for two hundred years in Ireland. She loved the country and always wrote of it with a loving pen. Before Castle Rackrent was written, Ireland had been for many centuries an outcast in literature, known only for her blunders and bulls. But, as one of her characters says, "An Irish bull is always of the head, never of the heart." Even though her characters are humorous, they are never clowns. All the men have dignity, and all the women grace. She gave them a respectable place in literature. ”

“ Most novelists have been more intent on pointing a moral or producing a sensation than on the technique of their writing. Their works as a whole lack proportion. They obtrude unnecessarily in one part and are weak in another. Miss Austen wrote because the characters in her brain demanded expression. Who could remain silent with Elizabeth Bennet urging her to utterance? She wrote with the greatest care because she could do nothing slovenly. Whatever place may be assigned to her as the years go by, her novels surpass all others written in English in their perfect art. ”

“ The purity of the heroine triumphs. She meets a man whom she esteems and afterwards marries. Many of Laura's adventures border on the improbable, but her emotions are truthfully depicted.
This was a bolder novel than appears on the surface. Long before this the wicked heroine had been banished from fiction. The leading lady must be virtuous to keep the love of the hero. Richardson laid down that law of the novel. Mary Brunton asserted the same rule for the hero, and maintained that a gentleman, handsome, noble, accomplished, could not retain the love of a pure woman, if he were not virtuous. ”

“ Fashions in novels change at least every fifty years. Exciting plots and situations, strong emotional scenes, sharp contrasts, are not demanded by present readers, who also turn away with disgust from the saintly heroine and the irreclaimable villain. Of the many volumes of fiction written in the eighteenth century only two are in general circulation to-day, Robinson Crusoe and The Vicar of Wakefield. But all those once popular novels, even if their very names are now forgotten, have done their work in shaping the thought and morals of their own and succeeding generations. ”

“ Humphry Clinker, who "had made shift to live many years by writing novels, at the rate of five pounds a volume," complains that "that branch of business is now engrossed by female authors, who publish merely for the propagation of virtue, with so much ease, and spirit, and delicacy, and knowledge of the human heart, and all in the serene tranquillity of high life, that the reader is not only enchanted by their genius, but reformed by their morality." ”

“ A large income or a title was often capable of inspiring a feeling so akin to love that even the bosom that felt its glow was unable to distinguish the difference. Loss of respect could kill the strongest passion, and some of her heroines have even remained single, or else married men whom at first they had regarded with indifference, rather than marry the object of their first love after he had forfeited their esteem. ”