The novelist most admittedly generous to women is Meredith, and we have him to thank for Margaret Lovell, Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, Diana Warwick, and Clara Middleton, with Mrs. Berry as a sort of compromise between Mrs. Poyser and Mrs. Tulliver. Yet they do not any more than live up to their boasted reputations, as dainty rogues in porcelain, famous epigrammatists, the quoted astonishment of drawing-rooms.[159]
The real Victorian Shakespeare in the matter of women is Trollope. Not entirely unworthy of the sisterhood of Beatrice, Viola, and Portia, are Miss Dunstable, Lily Dale, Lucy Robarts, and Violet Effingham; Madeline Stanhope might be added as a village Cleopatra.
Lily Dale is plaintively sympathetic on the subject of the sorrows of men through the vexations of their amusements:[160]
“Women must amuse themselves, except for an annual treat or two. But the catering for men’s sport is never ending, and is always paramount to everything else. And yet the pet game of the day never goes off properly. In partridge time, the partridges are wild and won’t come to be killed. In hunting time, the foxes won’t run straight,—the wretches. They show no spirit, and will take to ground to save their brushes. Then comes a nipping frost, and skating is proclaimed; but the ice is always rough, and the woodcocks have deserted the country. And as for salmon,—when the summer comes round I do really believe that they suffer a great deal about the salmon. I am sure they never catch any. So they go back to their clubs and their cards, and abuse their cooks and blackball their friends.”
As to the adorable, captivating kind, she is not too sanguine:[161]
“The Apollos of the world * * * who are so full of feeling, so soft-natured, so kind, who never say a cross word, who never get out of bed on the wrong side in the morning,—it so often turns out that they won’t wash.”
Of Lucy Robarts Trollope himself speaks with justifiable pride, and says he does not see “how any character could be more natural than she.” She is indeed a sunny, breezy, English maid, endowed with charm, enterprise, and a resourcefulness that could outwit with dignity the titled dowager who did not want to be her mother-in-law. But her chief distinction, in which she is more unusual than “natural,” is the possession of that kind of humor defined by Howells as “the cry of pain of a well-bred man.” When her pride is wounded, her love baffled, her happiness apparently shipwrecked, her course of action made most difficult, she is able to say to her sister:[162]
“Fanny, you have no idea what an absolute fool I am, what an unutterable ass. The soft words of which I tell you were of the kind which he speaks to you when he asks you how the cow gets on which he sent you from Ireland, or to Mark about Ponto’s shoulder. * * *
“He is no hero. There is nothing on earth wonderful about him. I never heard him say a single word of wisdom, or utter a thought that was akin to poetry. He devotes all his energies to riding after a fox or killing poor birds, and I never heard of his doing a single great action in my life. And yet * * *”
In tears and breathless excitement she admits the strength and reality of her love, and continues with the diagnosis: