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FEMALE NOVELISTS
No. II.—Mrs. Gore
What constitutes a first-rate novel is a problem which might raise consternation in the senate-house of Cambridge; a problem knotty enough to stagger the entire corporation of wranglers, and strike the senior ops ""all of a heap," and impel the junior ops (wooden spoon and all) to take refuge in suicide. When a plenary and all-satisfying definition has once been given, it will be time to append to the main proposition the accompanying "rider:" viz., whether the accomplishment of a first-rate novel is within the potential limits of female genius—whether it lies within or beyond the frontiers assigned to womanly capacity by psychological map-makers. If the ideal novel be as difficult of realisation as a first-class poem or play, we fear, both on à priori and à posteriori grounds, that the verdict will go against "the sex." Most of their wisest brethren, and some of their wisest selves-(we tremble, currente calamo, as we remember the existence of Mrs. Bloomer and the Emancipationists!)—emphatically support this view of the case. If the view be fallacious, it can, and ought to be, disproved by facts. And so it is! indignantly exclaims some belle Amazon—facts are against it. To which some uncourteous infidel, having examined the evidence, will probably reply: Tant pis pour les faits. And then the malignant scoffer, shaking his perennial wig, will order judgment to go by default. "Woman, sister!"—thus have we seen the better half of the genus homo apostrophised by one of its most chivalric admirers—"Woman, sister! there are some things which you do not execute as well as your brother man; no, nor ever will. Pardon me, if I doubt whether you will ever produce a great poet from you choirs, or a Mozart, or a Phidias, or a Michael Angelo, or a great philosopher, or a great scholar—by which last is meant, not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination, bringing together from the four winds, like the angels of the resurrection, what else were dust from dead men's bones, into the unity of breathing life. If you can create yourselves into any of these great creators, why have you not?" Mrs. Gore, one of the cleverest of her sex, holds to the same creed, and explicitly states her conviction,[1] that a woman of first-rate faculties would constitute only a third-rate man; citing the names of Mrs. Somerville, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Martineau, and Mrs. Browning, as confirming her rule—"such rare exceptions that I can find (so she writes in 1848) no fifth to add to the catalogue." Nevertheless, if that is a first-rate novel of its kind, which holds a polished mirror up to London high life,, and secures glittering and vivacious reflections of its giddy, madding crowds, and whiles away idle or heavy hours by witty sketches of men and manners, and shoots Folly as it flies with shafts of singular point, Mrs. Gore will take honours in the first class, with such others as Lister and Disraeli, Hook and Bulwer Lytton. We are far from calling the fashionable novel a first-rate thing; the world, or a "pretty considerable" fraction of it is very properly, and none too soon, growing weary of that department of
- ↑ Preface to Mrs. Armytage.
