Though we should alter a good deal, perhaps, in detail—of manner, thought, and ideal—it is difficult to see how work could be done better for the particular class of readers appealed to; who would, undoubtedly, actually prefer a crowd.
Once more, Miss Yonge is frankly feminine. She has established one more special function for women novelists, a legitimate offspring of the domestic realism which they followed from the first; a work almost impossible to man.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] As Lockhart expresses it in the Quarterly, “There is a decided family likeness between Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, yet the aspect of the Jane and Rochester animals in their native state, as Catherine and Heathcliff, is too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable even to the most vitiated class of novel readers. With all the unscrupulousness of the French school of novels it combines that repulsive vulgarity in the choice of its vice which supplies its own antidote.”
[14] “She did not approve of twilight walks. Why should they want to go out just then like the tradespeople, a thing which ladies never did.”
A PROFESSIONAL WOMAN
(George Eliot, 1819-1880)
George Eliot once declared that “if art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.... The only effect I long to produce by my writings is that those who read them shall be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves.”
It is written in Adam Bede:
“My strongest effort is to avoid any arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in a witness box narrating my experience on oath....
“I would not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields—on the real breathing men and women who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice, who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice.