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he could as easily put on the one as the other, and become a Fox Indian to Fox Indians, or a monthly nurse to monthly nurses, as he can be a German physiognomist to his audience at the Egyptian Hall. The most curious question which his entertainment suggests, is this: Has the character of each man a natural dress of its own beyond and over itself, as the body has? is

a certain costume of expression, which covers and conceals without properly disguising the true character, the natural clothing of a civilized mind, or is it the very character itself, the naked individual character, without dress of any sort, which should come out in the expression of sincere men? For our parts, we believe that just as it is natural with all civilized men to wear clothes, and clothes are not an insincerity, but a decency of the body; so that it is natural with all civilized minds to wear moral clothes; and that moral clothes, that is, moral lines of expression which express something more than the mere individual man, moral lines of expression which, while they are individual enough to tell the intellectual stature, and the capacities, and the nature of the individual, still veil from the eye of others the inmost individuality, are not an insincerity or mask, but a decency of the mind. Mr. Schulz himself, while putting on all sorts of moral masks and dominoes over his own personal moral costume, never took that off to show the absolute individual stripped of all moral conventions beneath. And the eras in any history or society when men are disposed to throw off all the national and conventional dress of character, as we may call it, and expose the naked individuality beneath, are usually eras of danger, revolution, and national shame.

From the London Review. DR. STARK ON CELIBACY.

In the story of "Kavanagh" we find a schoolmaster who sketches a plan of arithmetic by which that dry study may be rendered as interesting as a romance. From the last reports of the Scottish Register Of fice we learn that the death rate among bachelors is double what it is among married men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty between thirty and thirty-five it remains at nearly the same proportion;

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while on the whole, taking married and single in the lump, husbands live twenty years longer than unmated gentlemen. Now if we take these statistics to be correct, they give rise to one or two curious reflections, Is the superior duration a direct effect from the cause? We forget if Cornaro included matrimony among his receipts for longevity; but it is evident that after Dr. Stark's announcement, a modern Cornaro must do so. We must marry to live. Whatever be the risks that surround the more complete state they are altogether overbalanced by a lengthened lease of existence. It is better to be worried by a vixen than be shuffled off before our time. It is, literally, either "death or Anastasia," as Morton puts it. Dr. Stark should have had his carte taken before Valentine's-day with Azrael standing by him, and demanding of a bachelor, Your marriage certificate or your life." We are certain, the design would have been eminently popular with young ladies. There is a story of a prescription for a king in the Old Testament, to which we need not more directly advert than to say it touches the subject we are upon. Another grace is bestowed on the sex. They are more than ever our preservers. We can love them now as we do ourselves. Hygiene shakes hands with Hymen. But what if Dr. Stark's figures bear a different interpretation? Suppose we regard the hecatomb of bachelors as an offering upon the shrine of blighted affection? Young men are jilted, and die of it. Their more fortunate friends bask in the heat of the domestic hearth, while poor "Tom's a-cold," "Tom all alone" shivering in the dreary world without, until he is carted off under the direction of an economical Necropolis Company. Indeed, this suggests to us that bachelors could not do better than combine for the purpose of interring each other as cheaply as possible. Dr. Stark puts matters in a way that there is no shirking. He does not say whom or what you are to marry, but widow or maid you must engage with, if your career is not to be cut down to half its legitimate extent. The reason of the wonderful difference is certainly not on the surface. Bachelors are not invariably rakes; and a modern bachelor well schooled in the modes of pleasure knows how to enjoy them with as little detriment to his health as possible. It is said that a man with asthma survives that complaint for an intolerable period; but we refrain from associating his powers of endurance with those of a father of a family. A bachelor should have few cares even if he keeps late

hours. Then we have heard of "old" bachelors; is the race threatened with extinction? The more we look at Dr. Stark's sums the more they puzzle us. His bachelors, for we are tempted to believe that he is in a measure the proprietor of the lot he makes an example of must be an entirely different set from those we are accustomed to meet. What kills them? And when we have asked that question we should like to know why they apparently prefer sudden death to lingering matrimony. Dr. Stark with a grim exactness, holds out this warning scroll of mortality, which we have no doubt will be made a text sheet by mothers with marriageable daughters. It comes opportunely at the commencement of the season. Can meerschaum or the cigars of Havana be the cause of the mischief? Would a latch-key unlock the mystery? Do bachelors pine at lonely moments in chambers and lodgings, and then expire of broken hearts? Dr. Stark should have informed us of the number of young ladies who live and die unwon. He should have set one column off against the other. We are curious on this point, or rather curious as to the manner in which Dr. Stark would make it, for our own Registrar-General has never produced the startling effects of the Scotch statistician, although he has cast up very similar accounts.

In Scotland, Dr. Stark's native ground, there is a bold indecision on the subject of marriage which periodically affects the returns of births. But Scotland is a very pious country, and the good people do not mind trifles as long as they observe the Sabbath, and keep music out of the churches. We trust, however, that the fatal influence of celibacy, as shown by Dr. Stark, will have an effect upon those incidental moralities which do not include the crime of whistling in the streets on Sundays. For us the figures are pregnant with conviction if we could only be satisfied as to their correctness. Figures, after all, are nothing if not correct, and when Dr. Lankester pronounced his sweeping opinion on the women of London, it made every difference in the force of it to find that he was only half right. If Dr. Stark is right, bachelors should literally marry in haste in the teeth of the rest of the If Dr. Stark is wrong, they do not lose much after all for taking the course suggested by his calculations.

saw.

From the Saturday Review.

WOMEN'S HEROINES.

A VIGOROUS and pertinacious effort has of late years been made to persuade mankind that beauty in women is a matter of very little moment. As long as literature was more or less a man's vocation, an opposite tendency prevailed; and a successful novelist would as soon have thought of flying as of driving a team of ugly heroines through three volumes. The rapid and portentous increase of authoresses changed the current of affairs. As a rule, authoresses do not care much about lovely women; and they must naturally despise the miserable masculine weakness which is led captive by a pretty face, even if it be only upon paper. They can have no patience with such feebleness, and it may well seem to them to be a high and important mission to help to put it down. It became, accordingly, the fashion at one time among feminine writers of fiction to make all their fascinating heroines plain girls with plenty of soul, and to show, by a series of thrilling love adventures, how completely in the long run the plain girls had the best of it. There is a regular type of ideal young lady in women's novels, to which we have at last become accustomed. She is not at all a perfect beauty. Her features are not as finely chiselled as a Greek statue; she is taller, we are invariably told, than the model height, her nose is retroussé; and in some lights" an unfavorable critic might affirm that her hair was positively tawny. But there is a well of feeling in her big brown eyes, which when united to genius, invariably bowls over the hero of the book. And the passion she excites is of that stirring kind which eclipses all others. Through the first two volumes the predestined lover flirts with the beauties who despise her, dances with them under her eye, and wears their colours in her presence. But at the end of the third an expressive glance tells her that all is right, and that big eyes and a big soul have won the race in a canter. Jane Eyre was perhaps the first triumphant succss of this particular school of art. And Jane Eyre certainly opened the door to a long train of imitators. For many years every woman's novel had got in some dear and noble creature, generally underrated, and as often as not in embarrassed circumstances, who used to capture her husband by sheer force of genius, and by pretending not to notice him when he came into the Some pleasant womanly enthusiasts

room.

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even went further, and invented heroines | adopt all the expressions in the Athanasian with tangled hair and inky fingers. We do creed. It is the heroine's mission to cure not feel perfectly certain that Miss Yonge, this mental malady; to point out to him, for instance, has not married her inky Miner- from the impartial point of view of those vas to nicer and more pious husbands, as a who have never committed the folly of studyrule, than her uninky, ones. The advantage ing Kant or Hegel, how thoroughly superfiof the view that ugly heroines are the most cial Kant and Hegel are; and to remind him charming is obvious, if only the world could by moonlight, and in the course of spiritual be brought to adopt it. It is a well-meant flirtation on a balcony, of the unutterable protest in favour of what may be called, in truths in theology which only a woman can these days of political excitement, the naturally discern. We are far from wishing rights" of plain girls. It is very hard to to intimate that there is not a good deal of think that a few more freckles or a quarter usefulness in such feminine points of view. of an inch of extra chin should make all The argumentum ad sexum, if not a logical, the difference in life to women, and those is often no doubt a practical one, and woof them who are intellectually fitted to play men are right to employ it whenever they a shining part in society or literature may can make it tell. And as it would be imbe excused for rebelling against the mascu- possible to develop it to any considerable line heresy of believing in beauty only. extent in a dry controversial work, authorWhenever such women write, the constant esses have no other place to work it in exmoral they preach to us is that beauty is a cept in a romance. What they do for redelusion and a snare. This is the moral of ligion in pious novels, they do for other Hetty in Adam Bede, and it is in the un- things in productions of a more strictly secsympathetic and cold way in which Hetty ular kind. There is, for instance, a popuis described that one catches glimpses of the lar and prevalent fallacy that women ought sex of the consummate author of the story. to be submissive to, and governed by, their She is quite alive to Hetty's plump arms lords and masters. In feminine fiction we and pretty cheeks. She likes to pat her and see a very wholesome reaction against this watch her, as if Hetty were a cat, or some mistaken supposition. The hero of the other sleek and supple animal. But we feel female tale is often a poor, frivolous, easily that the writer of Adam Bede is eyeing led person. When he can escape from his Hetty all over from the beginning to the wife's eye, he speculates heavily on the end, and considering in herself the while Stock Exchange, goes in under the influence what fools men are. It would be unjust of evil advisers for every sort of polite and untrue to say that George Eliot in all swindling, and forgets, or is ill-tempered her works does not do ample justice, in a towards, the inestimable treasure he has at noble and generous way, to the power of home. On such occasions the heroine of female beauty. The heroines of Romola the feminine novel shines out in all her and Felix Holt prove distinctly that she does. majesty. She is kind and patient to her But one may fairly doubt whether a man husband's faults, except that when he is could have painted Hetty. When one sees more than usually idiotic her eyes flash, and the picture, one understands its truth; but her nostrils dilate with a sort of grand scorn, men who draw pretty faces usually do so while her knowledge of life and business is with more enthusiasm. displayed at critical moments to save him from ruin. When every one else deserts him, she takes a cab into the City, and employs some clever friend, who has always been hopelessly in love with her and for whom she entertains, unknown to her husband, a Platonic brotherly regard — to intervene in the nick of time, and to arrest her husband's fall. In a story called Sowing the Wind, which has recently been published, the authoress (for we assume, in spite of the ambiguous assertion on the title-page, that the pen which wrote it was not really a man's) goes to very great lengths. The hero, St. John Alyott, is always snubbing and lecturing Isola, whom he married when she was half a child, and whom he treats as a child long after she has become a great

A similar sort of protest may be found lurking in a great many women's novels against the popular opinion that man is the more powerful animal, and that a wife is at best a domestic appanage of the husband. Authoresses are never weary of attempts to set this right. They like to prove, what is continually true, that feminine charms are the lever that moves the world, and that the ideal woman keeps her husband and all about her straight. In religious novels woman's task is to exercise the happiest influence on the man's theological opinions. Owing to the errors he has imbibed from the study of a false and shallow philosophy, he sees no good in going to church twice on Sundays, or feels that he cannot heartily

and glorious woman. He administers the habit of meeting any. The fact is that the
doctrine of conjugal authority to her
in season and out of season, and his
object is to convert her into a loving
feminine slave. Against this revolting the-
ory her nature rebels. Though she pre-
serves her wifely attachment to a man whom
she has once thought worthy of better
things, her respect dies away, and at last
she openly defies him when he wants her,
in contravention of her plain duty, not to
adopt as her son a deserted orphan boy.
At this point her character stands out in
noble contrast to his. She does adopt the
boy, and brings him to live with her in
spite of all; and when St. John is unnat-
urally peevish at its childish squalling, Isola
bears his fretful animadversions with a pa-
tient dignity that touches the hearts of all
about her. Any husband who can go on
preaching about conjugal obedience through
three volumes to a splendid creature who is
his wife, must have something wrong about
his mind. And something wrong about St.
John's mind there ultimately proves to be.
It flashes across Isola that this is the case,
and before long her worst suspicions are con-
firmed. At last St. John breaks out into
open lunacy, and dies deranged-a fate
which is partly the cause, and partly the
consequence of his continual indulgence
in such wild theories about the relations of
man and wife. It is not every day that we
have the valuable lesson of the rights of
wives so plainly or so practically put before
us, but when it is put before us, we recog-
nise the service that may be conferred on
literature and society by lady authors. To
assert the great cause of the independence
of the female sex is one of the ends of femi-
nine fiction, just as the assertion of the
rights of plain girls is another. Authoresses
do not ask for what Mr. Mill wishes them
to have a vote for the borough, or per-
haps a seat in Parliament. They do ask
that young women should have a fair matri-
monial chance, independently of such trivial
considerations as good looks, and that after
marriage they should have the right to de-
spise their husbands whenever duty and
common sense tell them it is proper to do so.
The odd thing is that the heroines of
whom authoresses are so fond in novels are
not the heroines whom other women like
in real life. Even the popular authoresses
of the day, who are always producing some
lovely panthe ess in their stories, and mak-
ing her achieve an endless series of impossi-
ble exploits, would not care much about a
lovely pantheress in a drawing-room or a
country-house; and are not perhaps in the

vast majority of women who write novels
do not draw upon their observation for their
characters so much as upon their imagina-
tion. In some respects this is curious
enough, for when women observe, they ob-
serve acutely and to a good deal of pur-.
pose. Those of them, however, who take
to the manufacture of fiction have
gener-
ally done so because at some portion of
their career they have been thrown back
upon themselves. They began perhaps to
write when circumstances made them feel
isolated from the rest of their little world,
and in a spirit of sickly concentration upon
their own thoughts. A woman with a turn
for literary work who notices that she is dis-
tanced, as far as success or admiration goes,
by rivals inferior in mental capacity to her-
self, flies eagerly to the society of her own
fancies, and makes her pen her greatest
friend. It is the lot of many girls to pass
their childhood or youth in a somewhat
monotonous round of domestic duties, and
frequently in a narrow domestic circle, with
which, except from natural affection, they
may have no great intellectual sympathy.
The stage of intellectual fever through
which able men have passed when they
were young is replaced, in the case of girls
of talent, by a stage of moral morbidity.
At first this finds vent in hymns, and it
turns in the end to novels. Few clever
young ladies have not written religious
poetry at one period or other of their
history, and few that have done so,
stop there without going further. It is a
great temptation to console oneself for the
shortcomings of the social life around, by
building up an imaginary picture of social
life as it might be, full of romantic adven-
tures and pleasant conquests.
facturing her heroines, the young recluse
author puts on paper what she would
herself like to be, and what she thinks she
might be if only her eyes were bluer, her
purse longer, or men more wise and discern-
ing. In painting the slights offered to her
favourite ideal, she conceives the slights
that might possibly be offered to herself,
and the triumphant way in which she would
(under somewhat more auspicious circum-
stances) delight to live them down and tram-
ple them under foot. The vexations and
the annoyances she describes with considera-
ble spirit and accuracy. The triumph is
the representation of her own delicious
dreams. The grand character of the im-
aginary victim is but a species of phantom
of herself, taken, like the German's camel,
from the depths of her own self-conscious-

In manu

the glorified adulteresses and murderesses which at present seem the latest and most successful efforts of feminine art.

From the Saturday Review, 2 March.

THE FRENCH YELLOW-BOOK.

ness, and projected into cloudland. This is the reason why authoresses enjoy dressing up a heroine who is ill-used. They know the sensation of social martyrdom, and it is a gentle sort of revenge upon the world to publish a novel about an underrated martyr, whose merits are recognised in the end, either before or after her decease. They are probably not conscious of the precise work they are performing. They are not aware that their heroine represents what they believe they themselves would prove to be under impossible circumstances, provided they had only golden hair and a wider THE French Yellow-book scarcely prosphere of action. This is but another and fesses to be more than a collection of the a larger phase of a phenomenon which most presentable diplomatic despatches of all of us have become familiar with who the last year. No Frenchman, and none have ever had a large acquaintance with but the most sanguine foreigner, expects to young ladies' poems. They all write about find in it anything that is likely to ruffle death with a pertinacity that is positively the vanity of the great French nation. In astounding. It is not that the young peo- the few correspondences which are allowed ple actually want to die. But they like the to filter through to the light, the Imperial idea that their family circle will find out, Government is always triumphant, magwhen it is too late, all the mistakes and in- nanimous, and candid, and at the end of justices it has committed towards them, and every political episode seems to throw itself that this world will perceive that it has been into the defiant attitude of the conjuror who entertaining unawares an augel, just as the has once more succeeded in swallowing a angel had taken flight upwards to another. small sword, several live rabbits, and a The juvenile aspirant commences with re- lighted candle. The prodigious effect is venging her wrongs in heaven, but it produced or enhanced by a little gentle occurs to her before long that she can with legerdemain. M. MOUSTIER appears to equal facility have them revenged upon earth. Poetry gives way to prose, and hymnology to fiction. The element of selfconsciousness, unknown to herself, still continues to prevail, and to colour the character of the heroines she turns out. Of course great authoresses shake themselves free from it. Real genius is independent of sex, and first-rate writers, whether they are men or women, are not morbidly in love with an idealized portrait of themselves. But the poorer and less worthy class of feminine novelists seldom escape from the fatal influence of egotism. Women's heroines, except in the case of the best artists, are conceptions borrowed, not from without, but from within. The consequence is that there is a sameness about them which becomes at last distasteful. The conception of the injured wife or the glorified governess is one which was a novelty fifteen or twenty years ago, while it cannot be said any longer to be lively or entertaining. As literature has grown to be a woman's occupation, we are afraid that glorified governesses in fiction will, like the poor, be always with us, and continue to the end to run their bright course of universal victory. The most, perhaps, that can be hoped is that they will in the long run take the wind out of the sails of

have eaten up Mr. SEWARD, whereas in reality he has got the most indigestible part of him up his sleeve. Count BISMARK and M. RICASOLI, in like manner, are seldom introduced except to thank HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY for the services he has rendered to civilization; while the rebuffs, the remonstrances, the protests, and the discourtesies are rigidly suppressed. Documents that have been penned by the French Foreign Office are given in moderate plenty; the documents addressed to it appear at occasional intervals; and considerable lacuna testify to the astute vigilance of the official editor. A résumeé of the general political situation serves as a preface, and is an able and interesting production. After the exploits of the Imperial pen, come the achievements of the Imperial scissors; and the Yellow book which follows is nothing better than a mutilated version of the history of the preceding twelve months.

The volume opens with despatches immediately preceding the outbreak of the German war. The French Government foresaw the storm that was on the eve of breaking, and in May, 1866, was making every effort to avert it. The English Foreign Office, with its usual pedantic stolidity,

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