THE FIRE-TENDER.The most disagreeable object to me in modern literature is the man the women novelists have introduced as the leading character; the women who come in contact with him seem to be fascinated by his disdainful mien, his giant strength, and his brutal manner.He is broad across the shoulders, heavily moulded, yet as lithe as a cat; has an ugly scar across his right cheek; has been in the four quarters of the globe; knows seventeen languages; had a harem in Turkey and a Fayaway in the Marquesas; can be as polished as Bayard in the drawing-room, but is as gloomy as Conrad in the library; has a terrible eye and a withering glance, but can be instantly subdued by a woman's hand, if it is not his wife's; and through all his morose and vicious career has carried a heart as pure as a violet.
THE MISTRESS.Don't you think the Count of Monte Cristo is the elder brother of Rochester?
THE FIRE-TENDER.One is a mere hero of romance; the other is meant for a real man.
MANDEVILLE.I don't see that the men novel-writers are better than the women.
HERBERT.That's not the question; but what are women who write so large a proportion of the current stories bringing into literature?
Aside from the question of morals, and the absolutely demoralizing manner of treating social questions, most of their stories are vapid and weak beyond expression, and are slovenly in composition, showing neither study, training, nor mental discipline.
THE MISTRESS.Considering that women have been shut out from the training of the universities, and have few opportunities for the wide observation that men enjoy, isn't it pretty well that the foremost living writers of fiction are women?
HERBERT.You can say that for the moment, since Thackeray and Dickens have just died.But it does not affect the general estimate.
We are inundated with a flood of weak writing.Take the Sunday-school literature, largely the product of women; it has n't as much character as a dried apple pie.I don't know what we are coming to if the presses keep on running.
OUR NEXT DOOR.We are living, we are dwelling, in a grand and awful time; I'm glad I don't write novels.
THE PARSON.So am I.
OUR NEXT DOOR.I tried a Sunday-school book once; but I made the good boy end in the poorhouse, and the bad boy go to Congress; and the publisher said it wouldn't do, the public wouldn't stand that sort of thing.Nobody but the good go to Congress.
THE MISTRESS.Herbert, what do you think women are good for?
OUR NEXT DOOR.That's a poser.
HERBERT.Well, I think they are in a tentative state as to literature, and we cannot yet tell what they will do.Some of our most brilliant books of travel, correspondence, and writing on topics in which their sympathies have warmly interested them, are by women.
Some of them are also strong writers in the daily journals.
MANDEVILLE.I 'm not sure there's anything a woman cannot do as well as a man, if she sets her heart on it.
THE PARSON.That's because she's no conscience.
CHORUS.O Parson!
THE PARSON.Well, it does n't trouble her, if she wants to do anything.She looks at the end, not the means.A woman, set on anything, will walk right through the moral crockery without wincing.
She'd be a great deal more unscrupulous in politics than the average man.Did you ever see a female lobbyist? Or a criminal? It is Lady Macbeth who does not falter.Don't raise your hands at me! The sweetest angel or the coolest devil is a woman.I see in some of the modern novels we have been talking of the same unscrupulous daring, a blindness to moral distinctions, a constant exaltation of a passion into a virtue, an entire disregard of the immutable laws on which the family and society rest.And you ask lawyers and trustees how scrupulous women are in business transactions!
THE FIRE-TENDER.Women are often ignorant of affairs, and, besides, they may have a notion often that a woman ought to be privileged more than a man in business matters; but I tell you, as a rule, that if men would consult their wives, they would go a deal straighter in business operations than they do go.
THE PARSON.We are all poor sinners.But I've another indictment against the women writers.We get no good old-fashioned love-stories from them.It's either a quarrel of discordant natures one a panther, and the other a polar bear--for courtship, until one of them is crippled by a railway accident; or a long wrangle of married life between two unpleasant people, who can neither live comfortably together nor apart.I suppose, by what I see, that sweet wooing, with all its torturing and delightful uncertainty, still goes on in the world; and I have no doubt that the majority of married people live more happily than the unmarried.But it's easier to find a dodo than a new and good love-story.
MANDEVILLE.I suppose the old style of plot is exhausted.
Everything in man and outside of him has been turned over so often that I should think the novelists would cease simply from want of material.
THE PARSON.Plots are no more exhausted than men are.Every man is a new creation, and combinations are simply endless.Even if we did not have new material in the daily change of society, and there were only a fixed number of incidents and characters in life, invention could not be exhausted on them.I amuse myself sometimes with my kaleidoscope, but I can never reproduce a figure.No, no.I cannot say that you may not exhaust everything else: we may get all the secrets of a nature into a book by and by, but the novel is immortal, for it deals with men.
The Parson's vehemence came very near carrying him into a sermon; and as nobody has the privilege of replying to his sermons, so none of the circle made any reply now.
Our Next Door mumbled something about his hair standing on end, to hear a minister defending the novel; but it did not interrupt the general silence.Silence is unnoticed when people sit before a fire;it would be intolerable if they sat and looked at each other.
The wind had risen during the evening, and Mandeville remarked, as they rose to go, that it had a spring sound in it, but it was as cold as winter.The Mistress said she heard a bird that morning singing in the sun a spring song, it was a winter bird, but it sang