We judge a pudding by the eating, and I judge Messrs. Mudie and Smith by what they have produced; for they, not the ladies and gentlemen who place their names on the title pages, are the authors of our fiction. And what a terrible brood to admit the parentage of! Let those who doubt put aside pre-conceived opinions, and forgetting the bolstered up reputation of the authors, read the volumes by the light of a little common sense. Cast a glance at those that lie in Miss Rhoda Broughton’s lap. What a wheezing, drivelling lot of bairns they are! They have not a virtue amongst them, and their pinafore pages are sticky with childish sensualities.
And here we touch the keynote of the whole system. For, mark you, you can say what you like provided you speak according to rule. Everything is agreed according to precedent. I could give a hundred instances, but one will suffice. On the publication of “Adam Bede” a howl was raised, but the book was alive; it finished by being accepted, and the libraries were obliged to give way. The employment of seduction in the fabulation of a story was therefore established. This would have been a great point gained, if Mr. Mudie had not succeeded in forcing on all succeeding writers George Eliot’s manner of conducting her story. In “Adam Bede” we have Hetty described as an extremely fascinating dairymaid and Arthur as a noble-minded young man. After a good deal of flirtation they are shown to us walking through a wood together, and three months after we hear that Hetty is _enceinte_. Now, ever since the success of this book was assured, we have had numberless novels dealing with seductions, but invariably an interval of three months is allowed wherein the reader’s fancy may disport until the truth be told.
Not being a select librarian I will not undertake to say that the cause of morality is advanced by leaving the occurrence of the offence unmarked by a no more precise date than that of three months, but being a writer who loves and believes in his art, I fearlessly declare that such quibblery is not worthy of the consideration of serious men; and it was to break through this puerile conventionality that I was daring enough in my “Mummer’s Wife” to write that Dick dragged Kate into the room and that the door was slammed behind her. And it is on this passage that the select circulating libraries base a refusal to take the book. And it is such illiterate censorship that has thrown English fiction into the abyss of nonsense in which it lies; it is for this reason and no other that the writers of the present day have ceased even to try to produce good work, and have resigned themselves to the task of turning out their humdrum stories of sentimental misunderstanding. Yet, strange to say, in every other department of art, an unceasing intellectual activity prevails. Our poetry, our histories, our biographies, our newspapers are strong and vigorous, pregnant with thought, trenchant in style; it is not until we turn to the novel that we find a wearisome absence of everything but drivel.