III

Herbert returned to us in March.  The Young Lady was spending the winter with us, and March, in spite of the calendar, turned out to be a winter month.  It usually is in New England, and April too, for that matter.  And I cannot say it is unfortunate for us.  There are so many topics to be turned over and settled at our fireside that a winter of ordinary length would make little impression on the list.  The fireside is, after all, a sort of private court of chancery, where nothing ever does come to a final decision.  The chief effect of talk on any subject is to strengthen one’s own opinions, and, in fact, one never knows exactly what he does believe until he is warmed into conviction by the heat of attack and defence.  A man left to himself drifts about like a boat on a calm lake; it is only when the wind blows that the boat goes anywhere.

Herbert said he had been dipping into the recent novels written by women, here and there, with a view to noting the effect upon literature of this sudden and rather overwhelming accession to it.  There was a good deal of talk about it evening after evening, off and on, and I can only undertake to set down fragments of it.

Herbert.  I should say that the distinguishing feature of the literature of this day is the prominence women have in its production.  They figure in most of the magazines, though very rarely in the scholarly and critical reviews, and in thousands of newspapers; to them we are indebted for the oceans of Sunday-school books, and they write the majority of the novels, the serial stories, and they mainly pour out the watery flood of tales in the weekly papers.  Whether this is to result in more good than evil it is impossible yet to say, and perhaps it would be unjust to say, until this generation has worked off its froth, and women settle down to artistic, conscientious labor in literature.

The mistress.  You don’t mean to say that George Eliot, and Mrs. Gaskell, and George Sand, and Mrs. Browning, before her marriage and severe attack of spiritism, are less true to art than contemporary men novelists and poets.

Herbert.  You name some exceptions that show the bright side of the picture, not only for the present, but for the future.  Perhaps genius has no sex; but ordinary talent has.  I refer to the great body of novels, which you would know by internal evidence were written by women.  They are of two sorts:  the domestic story, entirely unidealized, and as flavorless as water-gruel; and the spiced novel, generally immoral in tendency, in which the social problems are handled, unhappy marriages, affinity and passional attraction, bigamy, and the violation of the seventh commandment.  These subjects are treated in the rawest manner, without any settled ethics, with little discrimination of eternal right and wrong, and with very little sense of responsibility for what is set forth.  Many of these novels are merely the blind outbursts of a nature impatient of restraint and the conventionalities of society, and are as chaotic as the untrained minds that produce them.