"I know, dear ladies, that you are angry at this statement. But, even at the risk of displeasing you, we must tell the truth. You would wish to represent yourselves as equitable, logical, and strictly just. * * * Women equitable, logical, and strictly just! Mercy upon us! If they were, population would cease, the world would be a howling wilderness."
The apologist errs, however, in supposing that any ladies,—real
or fictitious, his own characters or others',—are
angry at his accusation of injustice. Helen Pendennis,
Amelia Sedley, even Ethel Newcome and Lady Castelwood,
would be flattered; Becky Sharp and Beatrix Esmond
would not care. And as for Caroline Helstone,
Violet Effingham, Diana Warwick, Sandra Belloni, they
are too far away to be disturbed by either smoke or aroma.
For half our novelists, the woman question as such did not exist, and about the same number show little or no interest in the world of fashion, though the two lists coincide only in part. Lytton, Thackeray, Trollope, Meredith, and in a small way, Kingsley, have grudges against society in addition to its treatment of women and women's influence on it; while Disraeli, Dickens, and Butler have some general gibes at social follies.
From first to last in his near-half-century of writing, Lytton, himself to the manner born, loved to prick the social bubble. In youth he says:[1]
"The English of the fashionable world make business an enjoyment,
and enjoyment a business: they are born without a
smile; they rove about public places like so many easterly winds—cold,
sharp, and cutting; * * * while they have neg-*
- [Footnote: Meredith's Lady Wathin, who "both dreaded and detested brains in women,
believing them to be devilish;" but she might have reminded him of the twinkling chivalry of Christopher North, who confessed, "To my aged eyes a neat ankle is set off attractively by a slight shade of cerulian."]
- ↑ Pelham, 291.
