"We can but hope for a return from this invented matter and artificial style to an unabashed Victorianism, from which it should appear the author is trying to escape."
There is something spirited in a selection of quotations which begins and ends with such different conjectures as to the genesis of their subject. There can be no doubt about the earnestness of the hope expressed in the last one, for it is confirmed in the same words by more than one American journal.[#]
[#] The force of the unanimity of two or three American papers grows less when their reader perceives the verbal identity of the article throughout—and that their writers are not only unanimous, but unicorporeal. Numbers are impressive, but when they play fast and loose with plurality in this way, all their edge is taken off.
Another accusation against me is that I have given up nice people, and only write about nasty ones. Is this true? I myself thought Lucinda a nice enough girl, particularly when she was fishing in the sea for the phosphorescence. All the same, the following seemed to me quite a just comment, and very well worded: "There must have been something of Phaedra in Lucinda for her to act as she did, unless we are to revert to the belief in a baneful Aphrodite no human will can resist." Something of Phaedra—but still, I submit, not much, for Sir Oliver was passionately urgent; while Hippolytus—to borrow a phrase from Mrs. Steptoe, a quarter where I have unlimited credit—didn't want to any such a thing.
Every book has a right to an assumption intrinsically improbable, to make the story go. What a flat tragedy Hamlet would have been without its fundamental ghost! And my "quidlibet audendi" is a small presumption compared with my giant namesake's. Of course, I have no right to the comparison unless you grant like rights to tittlebat and leviathan. "Semper fiat aequa potestas," for both. Indeed, the dwarf needs artificial latitude more than the giant.
In my capacity of tittlebat in an estuary of Leviathan's great sea—or, should I not rather say, a sandhopper on its coast?—I have assumed that this baneful Aphrodite no human will can resist had possession of Lucinda; who was, and continued to be, a very nice girl for all that. Phaedra was not nice, because of the attitude of Hippolytus, as sketched by Mrs. Steptoe; and even more because of the fibs she told when she found the young man blind to the attractions of his stepmother. Lucinda was not a bit the less nice because she was swept away by, absorbed into, crushed under, a passion of which she only knew that it was the reverse of hate, and of which few of us know much more. Indeed, all male persuasions get so very mixed, owing to the Nature of Things, that they are almost a negligible factor in the solution of the problem. Now and again, however, it is hinted at by thoughtful male persons—Shakespeare and Browning, and the like. Read this, for instance:
"But, please you, wonder I would put
My cheek beneath that lady's foot;
Rather than trample under mine
The laurels of the Florentine,
And you shall see how the Devil spends
A fire God gave for other ends.
"I tell you, I stride up and down
This garret, crowned with Love's best crown,
And feasted with Love's perfect feast
To think I kill for her at least
Body and soul and peace and fame,
Alike youth's end and manhood's aim."
*****
Perhaps you will say that no ladylike, well-brought-up girl, ever feels so explosive. About a Man too—the idea! But for my part, I don't see that Browning's chap need have been a nasty chap. Nevertheless, my sense of the proprieties—which is keen—compels me to admit that if I had a daughter, and she were to go on like that, I should feel it my duty to point out to her that if she continued to do so, she would run the risk of being taken for a suffragette, or something. I might get no farther, because I word things badly.