Et quand sera-ce qu'au corps qu' Academique on nomme,
Grimperas-tu de roc en roc, rare homme?
EVOLUTIONARY HINTS FOR NOVELISTS.
We have Sheridan's authority that an oyster may be crossed in love—in fact, Miss Zimmern has written a story about an oyster that actually was a prey to the tender passion; we have Shakespeare's authority that a hind will die of it, if she unfortunately seeks to be mated with a lion; while it is a regular thing in the land of the cypress and myrtle (if Lord Byron can be trusted) for the rage of the vulture to madden to crime.
Still it was reserved for Darwin himself to give the great modern cue to novelists in their study of human nature, by his "Descent of Man," where he says that "injurious characters tend to reappear through reversion, such as blackness in sheep; and with mankind some of the worst dispositions which occasionally without any assignable cause make their reappearance in families, may perhaps he reversions to a savage state from which we are not removed by many generations. This view seems recognized in the common expression that such men are the 'black sheep of the family.'"
Now, whatever we may think of the odd logic of this passage, it clearly stakes out a ground and preëmpts a claim for evolution as applied to romantic literature. None of us could really blame the modern lover if, in making a woful ballad to his mistress's eyebrow, he should slyly but anxiously examine whether that eyebrow contained "a few hairs larger than the rest, corresponding to the vibrissæ of the lower animals." This does occur in some eyebrows, we know; and as it is also clear from the authorities first quoted, and many more that might be cited, that the lower animals are capable of human passions, the cautious and scientifically disposed lover of the modern epoch can hardly be asked to take a mere manifestation of the heavenly instinct as proof of many grades of removal, in his Dulcinea, from the condition of the oyster, the hind, or, alas! the vulture.
Hence, even in protesting that his lady's beauty hangs on the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Æthiop's ear, naturally the modern Romeo may not avoid a glance to see whether his Juliet's ear contains that fatal auricular "blunt point" denoting assimilation to the lower animals. And so it is with the work henceforth laid out for novelists: the stereotyped heroine, with coral lips, pearly teeth, eyes of a gazelle, raven locks, swan-like neck, and so on, should be carefully guarded from too great animal resemblances, and above all from "rudiments" or signs of reversion.
Perhaps it would be going too far to announce bluntly that "Lady Amarantha's toes had not the remotest indication of ever having been webbed," or to put on record the official declaration of Fifine, the maid, that her fair mistress never had been able to erect her ears; still the novelists might do well to take note of those two or three points in which Mr. St. George Mivart and Mr. Wallace have pointed out the great distinctions between men and apes, and so adroitly work them up in those personal descriptions which form a delicious part of modern novels, as to give their heroes and heroines a pedigree impregnable to the most critically scientific scrutiny. Hints, also, I think, might be gathered from the treatment of love on the evolution hypothesis, which has been essayed by no less an authority than Herbert Spencer, who has besides traced the changes in the methods of expressing passionate emotions by gestures and cries, as our humble ancestry developed to women and men.
Physiology, too, is not the only department into which the novelist of the future must extend his studies. Under the doctrine of evolution, sexual selection is at the basis of the variation of species; and what new fields are open to the novelist, when he reflects for a moment that his main task is only to depict the prosperities and adversities attending such a mutual selection on the part of Albert and Angelina!