Yet Thackeray reverts, particularly in Pendennis, to the “wild-oats” plot of Fielding; Dickens is quite innocent of artistic construction, as perfected in Jane Austen; and neither of them seems to have benefited at all from the extraordinary revelation of womanhood which we have traced from its earliest source.
Thackeray’s heroines are, one and all, obviously made by a man for men. Amelia is a hearth-rug, with a pattern of pretty flowers. Beatrice and Blanche are variants of the eternal flirt—as man reads her. Lady Castlewood, Helen and Laura Pendennis are of the women who spend their lives waiting for the right man. Ethel Newcome is a man’s dream; and we venture to fancy that if ever a woman be born with genius to draw Becky Sharpe, she would find something to add to the picture.
The case of Dickens is even more desperate. His “pretty housemaids,” indeed, are “done to a turn”; and Nancy is of the immortals. He could illustrate with melodramatic intensity certain feminine characteristics, good or evil, tragic or comic. But all his heroines belong to a few obvious waxwork types—the idiotic “pet” or the fireside “angel”; the “comfort” or the prig, composed of curls, blushes, and giggles; looks of reproach and tender advice. Possibly Dora is rather more aggravating than Dolly Varden, Agnes is wiser than Kate Nickleby, but they all work by machinery, with visible springs.
It was reserved for George Meredith to understand women.
APPENDIX
LIST OF MINOR WRITERS
(Their dates will indicate their place in our history of development: where they are not alluded to.)
Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (1624-1673), in her CCXI Sociable Letters (1664), tells an imaginary narrative by correspondence, which she describes as “rather scenes than letters, for I have endeavoured under cover of letters to express the humours of mankind.” Also author of Nature’s Pictures drawn by Fancie’s pencil (1656).
Frances Sheridan.—Her Memoirs of Miss Sydney Biddulph, extracted from her own Journal (1761), made a name by its supreme melancholy. The heroine suffers from obeying her mother, and receives no reward. Dr. Johnson “did not know whether she had a right, on moral principles, to make her readers suffer so much.”
Miss Clara Reeve (1725-1803) began to write novels at fifty-one, and attempted in The Old English Baron (1777) to compromise with the School of Terror, by limiting herself to “the utmost verge of probability.” Her “groan” is not interesting, and Scott complains of “a certain creeping and low line of narrative and sentiment”; adding, however, that perhaps “to be somewhat prosy is a secret mode of securing a certain necessary degree of credulity from the hearers of a ghost-story.”