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From The Saturday Review.
HOMICIDAL HEROINES.

deress of romance nowadays wears Balmoral boots, and goes religiously to kettle-drums. Her beauty is the most dazzling of all the beauty in the ball-room; her step the lightest and her smile the sweetest in the waltz. She loves and she is beloved, and the husband who in the first volume leads to the altar the fair innocent creature of nineteen will discover years after, and in the third volume, that before he married her she had already had, and possibly put an end to, a husband or so in private, forged perhaps a casual will, and led the county police a dance for a whole week. The mixture of crime and crinoline gives a reality to the story that is enough to take away the breath of any quiet middle-aged gentleman who takes up such great works of fiction. He knows, from imaginative people like Shakspeare and others, how poison is supposed to be administered in high fictitious life; that some prince catches another prince sleeping in a bower, and pours it in his ear, or that some beautiful Lucretia, after a festal banquet, hands a jewelled goblet containing it

THE authors and authoresses of the day are going in for crimes of every description, from murder downwards, in a manner that is most startling, and Mr. Mudie's lending library will soon become a sort of Newgate Calendar. What with lovely murderesses, and accomplished bigamists, and spies, and forgers, and here and there an occasional attorney who is on their trail, works of romance seem in a fair way to be very lively reading before long. The effect produced on sensible and unimaginative people ought to be to render them suspicious of their nearest acquaintances. The young lady who is kind enough to teach one's daughters French and music looks and talks like an ordinary being; but it is very likely, if we only knew all, that she has got a murderess in manuscript in her bedroom, at the elaboration of whose career she is working all her spare hours, and through the vivid delineation of whose amatory and homicidal performances she hopes herself to attain to a faithless lover. On the Turf, and among to literary fame. It is difficult to believe the lower classes, he is aware indeed that how anybody who is to all outward appear- the operation is performed in a less theatriance so harmless, and who takes her meals cal way; but as he is neither a prince nor a with such regularity, can be engaged in the faithless lover, nor a Dove, nor a Palmer, he manufacture of all the frightful sentiments concludes that he is tolerably safe and at and harrowing plots to the production of some distance from all such stirring inciwhich she retires, for anything we can tell, dents. But when he peruses the latest novel when the music-lessons and the French are from the circulating library he is recalled over for the day. If the authoress was in the to a sense of his insecure position. Bowers habit of depicting criminals in tragedy cos- and poisoned goblets are all moonshine and tume, with cloaks over their shoulders and nonsense. The thing is done every day daggers peeping from underneath, haunting much more simply, and with less ostentasome lonely wayside inn, or galloping across tion, at a picnic. Blanche finished off Aucountry on the back of some spirited horse, gustus when she handed him the cold pigone would not be so much surprised. Such con pie with a joke about his appetite, and would seem the natural accessories of hor- a hope that he would tell her if he felt inror in which feminine fancy dresses great clined for more. When Marian stayed beculprits. But this is not at all the conven- hind ostensibly to gather a wild rose in the tional thing. Romantic writers have far too hedge, she was in reality delayed for a minmuch savoir vivre to make their murderers ute or so in the occupation of stabbing Reor murderesses do anything so outlandish or ginald and burying his body in a ditch. absurd. That was the fault of taste commit- When she skips up, rose in hand, a quarter ted by writers of an older date who did not of an hour later, her laugh is just as genial know the world, and were always thinking as ever, and she will distribute five o'clock that criminals went about with a dagger or tea to her friends the same afternoon witha bowl. Experience of life teaches the fair out a cloud on her sweet sunny brow. novelist, as well as her masculine rivals, that Such is the teaching of the novel of the age. if one wishes to find crime, one has not A quiet man thinks all this very terrible, and got to go to the wayside inns, or to watch for opines that the book must have been writshadows alongside garden walls, or to listen by a she fiend. Nothing of the kind. ten for a stealthy footstep on the staircase when the clock is striking midnight; nor can she expect to catch her criminal hero or heroine in modern times performing in this violent and affected style. The mur

It has been written by the wife of the curate in an adjoining parish, or by a clever governess, or an amiable blue-stocking, whose times hangs heavy on her hands, and who composes this sort of thing when she is tired

of composing hymns. It would indeed be unjust to represent the literary performances of this kind as coming from feminine pens only. Male writers turn out lovely murderesses also, but not so well got up, or so piquante, or so dashing, and they cannot, at best, help making their heroine look a little ghastly in spite of all effort. The homicidal heroine of Armadale - with respect to Mr. Wilkie Collins be it spokenis not so fresh, or so virginal or so natural as, let us say, Miss Braddon would have made her. Dux fæmina facti. Authoresses have led off in this line of late years, and any attempt on the part of authors to cope with or to imitate them is visited with the failure it deserves. The picnic and poison school is a feminine school of art, though masculine proselytes are admitted. This makes it all the more bewildering, as we have said, to ordinary observers. Assuming that incidents of this kind are not the more real or common because they are so commonly described, what are we to think of the imagination that loves to brood on them? In what strange grooves has feminine genius begun to travel?

The three-volume homicidal heroine may or may not have been in the beginning, an attempt to introduce into the educated market an article which has been found productive of much emolument in a lower walk of literature, by the London Journal and other periodicals of the sort. 'If so, the adventure has been justified by success. If Belgravia and Mayfair did not tolerate tales of murder and of moonshine, the lending libraries would cease to patronise them; and the homicidal heroine, after walking the literary market in vain, would be compelled to fall back into her accustomed columns in the penny weeklies. As long as she fetches a price in higher circles, she will continue to to be produced with a rapidity and facility that is in itself a mark of some cleverness. Looking at the phenomenon from the economical point of view, its occurrence is capable therefore of explanation. As it is in other things, so it is in three-volume-novels. The supply keeps pace with the sale, and if the table-talk of Asmodeus would sell, whole editions of it would be written, printed, and published without any serious dificulty. But there are doubtless other causes that account for the manufacture of homicidal heroines. A romance must have something to hang itself upon. It may turn on the delineation, whether humourous or sentimental. of the shades of human life and character, or it may depend on the delineation of passion, or, lastly, it may be strong in incident

The

of a sensational kind; but it must be one of the three, or it is no romance at all. The gift of knowledge of the shades of life and character is not an ordinary one. It presupposes in the fortunate possessor either a keen observation of men and manners, coupled with some experience of both, or else in some singular and exceptional cases, a rich and sensitive imagination which makes up for want of experience of life by drawing on its own admirable resources. A real artist who labours at this class of creations does not necessarily attempt a universal portrait of mankind. If wise, he bounds his ambition by his powers or his experience, and confines himself to what he has studied or seen or felt himself. Within narrow limits, therefore, women are often really successful in this line. They cannot photograph the wide world; for one-hundreth part of its follies or vices or pursuits, unless they are unusually unlucky, they never can have observed. But give a first-rate authoress her own village or her own fireside, which she has seen, and she will produce upon them an admirable and occasionally humorous work. creators of homicidal heroines are debarred from this field of operation for the simple reason that they have, as a rule, neither delicacy of perception nor humour. The homicidal heroine never comes to us in the shape of the heroine of a character novel, and no ray of humour ever penetrates into the pages that are devoted to the chronicling of her exploits. She would find herself more in place in a romance which turned upon human passion. Passion stands nearer to crime than humour or sentiment does, and Medea or Clytemnestra or Lady Macbeth would serve as heroines either in a passionate or a purely sensational piece. But the authoress who deals in homicidal heroines is met here again by the old difficulty. To draw any passion in a refined way requires refinement. It is no use dressing up lust or vanity or revenge in crinoline, or in uniform, and calling it a human being. To be a successful picture, the lust or the vanity, or whatever in short is the passion to be portrayed ought to be superinduced upon a real substratum of human character, not to be made, in a naked sort of way, to stand as the whole of the character itself. Othello is not jealousy, nor is Ophelia love. The former is a man overwhelmed with jealousy, and the latter is a woman, if not a lady, underneath all her affection. To make a good passionate romance, one ought accordingly to be able to construct a man or a woman, after doing which one may put the passion

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on.

The homicidal-heroine school have not far less striking part in his story. The acshown that they can draw a man or a wo-curacy of Balzac in minutie is often overman; and no attempts at giving with fidelity rated, but, taken at its lowest, it is wonderthe shrieks or the extravagant gestures of ful enough, considering the range of subpassion would ever make up for the de- jects which he has handled. The result is ficiency. They are thrown back, accordingly, that the homicidal heroine cannot even sucon the last, remaining resource, that of ceed in being brought to justice with decent supplying in incident what is wanting in regularity. Deprive her of this last accessentiment, humour, and passion. And when sory, and, as she is not set off humourously they are thus driven to incident, and inci- or characteristically, or even as real crimident alone, they ought not perhaps to be nals are set off, with proper legal formalities, severely blamed for liking to have their what is she, and what is the novel that tells incident of a good downright startling kind. us about her, at the best? It has certainly As the firing is to consist entirely of blank a plot, and often an ingenious one. But for cartridge, they prudently put plenty of pow- this, it would be a simple waxwork show. der in, or else there would be no bang. Two kinds of amusement are, however, to be derived from it first, the amusement deducible from a clever conundrum or charade; and secondly, the amusement that can be had for a shilling at Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors. If Madame Tussaud could contrive a series of waxwork figures which would begin by looking like virtuous and lovely waxworks and end by turning into wax murderesses, she would have accomplished in wax all that homicidal-heroine-makers accomplish ordinarily upon paper. As a matter of taste, we prefer the waxworks to the murderesses with Balmoral boots and devilish eyes that stare at the public out of so many works of fiction. They are quite as natural, and they do not degrade literature. Nor are they laughable, although they may be monstrous; which cannot be said of all the crime and crinoline to which we are daily introduced with extraordinary gravity, and even comical solemnity, by some writers of the present generation.

The least examination of the sensational romances which we are discussing will show even a superficial critic that they are devoid of the qualities that are to be found in better works. It is not merely that they are sensational. They are without humour, and unfinished as sketches of character and life. It is to a certain extent providential that it should be so. Heaven, which tempers the wind to the shorn lamb also fits the workman for his task. Homicidal heroines could not be turned out by humorous writ

ers.

Such writers would be shocked at the extravance of their own conceptions, and common sense and humour would tone the heroine down till she was hardly homicidal, or at all events hardly sensational at all. Becky Sharp, in Vanity Fair, is an instance in point. Mr. Thackeray's humour enabled him to put her into a novel without making the novel ridiculous or sensational. Take away Mr. Thackeray's humour, and knowledge of character, and Becky Sharp would soon approximate to the Aurora Floyds or the Miss Gwilts of the day. As it is, she is as unlike them as a human being is unlike a ghoul. A strong proof of the inferiority of the modern article is afforded by the blunders in matters of detail into which the homicidal-heroine-maker almost invariably falls. Having to do with murderers and murderesses, he has naturally something to say to the police and to the law. Now it so happens that the procedure of a criminal court of justice is by no means complicated. A very little trouble and attention would be enough to familiarzie anybody with it. Yet the homicidal-heroine-maker never seems able to take this simple trouble, such as it is. His judges and his counsel and his attorneys are as little like the real thing as his murderers and murderesses are like the murderers and murderesses that figure in the dock. Balzac would have been twenty times as careful over details that played a

FOURTH SERIES. LIVING AGE. VOL. I.

From the Spectator of May 19. THE PRINCE OF WALES.

THERE is no man, and still less any woman, in England in so difficult a position as the Prince of Wales. One might almost wish that instead of a Salic law, we could have one limiting the line of succession to the English Throne to the eldest heir female of the Royal House, so that the sons might become at once Peers of the realm, with such duties as it is possible for Peers of the realm to undertake, and that no man need hang about society with the sort of shadowy grandeur that belongs to the heir of the Crown. All the duties of the Crown

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are tending every day to become more and more purely social. The political duties are not very onerous, and the less of individual character is thrown into them the better probably will the nation be satisfied; though we do not deny that a statesman of strong sense and cool self-denying judgment might still effect something useful in the position of an English King. But whatever might be made of the political duties of the Crown by a statesman of precisely the right temper and judgment, there is no question but that there is at least as much risk of a man of strong character and strong political convictions making mischief, as doing good in such a place. And discharge his political duties as he might, his social duties would still be the most important. Unfortunately too, very few men feel that there is as much reality in giving the tone to society as perhaps there really is, as certainly to most women there really appears to be. A Queen will almost always value the importance and opportunities of her social position a great deal more than a King, simply because she attaches more meaning to the general spectacle, the successes and the reverses, of social intercourse, and estimates probably more truly their practical influence on the intellectual and moral life of the nation of whose society she is the head. In a man, mere social influence and prestige is apt to seem hollow, if not a sham. He wearies of the everlasting forms, believes usually in the value of no action which does not lead to a visible and intelligible result, and frets at finding himself or thinking himself a lay figure, bound to go perpetually and mechanically through an interminable series of words and gestures which represent to him little or nothing of moment, and give him the feeling of being a tedious and pompous phantasm in a ceremonial dream. No wonder if ordinary men in such positions, with energies exhausted by pageant that has lost all its novelty, with very little insight into the side-play of social life, and as little faith as men usually show in the power of mere social "influences". that is, in mere vibrations given incidentally to certain strings of social sympathy or antipathy begin to think the only realities in their life are the physical pleasures and amusements in which they solace themselves for their unpalatable State appearances, and chafe very much under the ceremonial demands on their time which keep them at their appointed places in the puppet show, when they wish to be doing what seems to them quite as useful and a great deal less hollow, amusing themselves. No doubt a

man with strong intellectual tastes might sqeeze a good deal of interest out of the speeches, conversation, convictions, vivacity, and wit of the many distinguished men who are necessarily brought into close relations with the leader of English society; but then to give other men of superior powers full play involves self-forgetfulness; besides, every educated man has not got these tastes, and even if he had, would find plenty of occasion for tiresome self-denial, if he did his duty to all the society around him, before he could avail himself of such moderate opportunities of legitimate enjoyment. On the whole, no man's position in this Empire is less probably enviable than that of the Prince Wales. Even in society he is only deputy leader, that is, its leader with nearly all the toil and not nearly all the tinsel of the position. And as a man he probably does not feel,- certainly does not appear to feel,

that there is that valuable social power in his position which the Queen has always realized and used so well.

At all events, the general impression is that the Prince of Wales is beginning already to be bored with his no doubt somewhat monotonous routine of gilded labour. It is supposed that he feels the enthusiasm of greatdinner assemblies for their royal guest and the royal lady whom he represents rather tedious than otherwise; that even the brilliant and quite novel compliment invented by Sir Francis Grant at the Royal Academy the other day, of calling him a first-rate 'artist' on account of his rides across country after the foxhounds, and a 'brother of the brush' for his successes in being in at the death, fell almost dead upon that weatherbeaten surface of his mind on which the official compliments are habitually received;

that he thinks the inevitable toast of 'the Army' and the inevitable uncle who replies to it a growing fatigue; that the Navy and the Duke of Somerset exhaust his spiritual strength; and that when the Church and the Archbishop of Canterbury come upon the scene, he begins to ask himself in his despair whether the droning is not part of the laws of nature, and feels disposed to solve the doubt by testing how far he can really exercise any influence as a free agent on this mechanical succession of phenomena which he knows so fatally well, so that his request to his Grace to be brief and set him free for a cigar, was a sort of frantic attempt to dispel the fatalistic dream that was creeping upon him, and to answer the question whether he were really only a royal phenomenon,-not quite so evanescent as he could wish, or a human being with

pelled to dilate, did not point it out. It is in this indirect way that the great world of English society exercises an indefinite number of secondary influences on the numberless small worlds of English society which feed upon its views. And when the Prince of Wales honors such meetings as these with his presence, and yet suppresses the greater speakers, he does something to extinguish one of an infinite number of infinitesimal civilizing influences, which flow from the higher levels of English society to the lower.

a will. It is also supposed that the Prince's more useful for the purpose of awakenvalue for common-place enjoyments, his ing the minds of quiet people in the eager interest in the approaching Ascot country to great ideas than for any effect races, indeed in all amusements in which they produce at the moment. There are he is no longer the Prince but a human be- plenty of persons for instance who would ing, is increasing upon him, and rendering scarcely think of the value of such a thing him more and more impatient of the tedi- as Art or its study at all, if the men who ous State duties which he has to discharge. have mastered the best mode of giving a We can understand and excuse this feel- certain picturesque or intellectual interest ing of the intolerable weariness of social to every subject on which they are comState, especially in those who feel no genius for social life. But still the Prince ought to recollect that even if he cannot himself exercise the beneficial influence which some men and many women might exercise in his place, as heir to the English Crown, there is still something of dignity as well as of duty in enduring his position in society with fortitude and discharging his duties with diligence, if only for the sake of keeping the society of which he is the head decorously organized to receive the influence of those lower in rank, but more fitted to wield such influence than himself. He is the keystone of the arch of English society, and if he sets the example of regarding his obligations to it as a bore which ought to be got over as cursorily as possible, the result would not only be disorganizing to the whole world which he affects, but paralyzing to the influence of the lesser leaders, who do not regard their obligations in the same light. There is, we suppose, a certain amount of stately full-dress speech and congratulatory formula which is almost essential to the existence of society at all. To ordinary men like the Prince of Wales no doubt such full-dress formula of congratulation is a stupid routine to be got through; but it is not so with many of the eminent men who have to follow him,-who did follow him, or would have followed him, had he deigned to be followed, on the occasion of the Royal Academy anniversary which we have referred to. Even the formal toasts in reply to which they spoke give such men as Lord Derby, and Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Disraeli the opportunity of saying something that it is worth our while to listen to, and that, if spoken at the Royal Academy, really encourages the interest felt in Art all over England. No doubt the wearisome routine of public life tends to make everything that is formal seem a matter of course, and so to conceal a great part of the value of such formal addresses, from those who deliver and hear them. The true social influence of such addresses is perhaps less felt at the place at which they are delivered than at any other place in the kingdom. To some extent public men are talking machines,

This seems a very long homily to preach on so small an occasion as an abrupt departure of the Prince from the Royal Academy dinner. And of course the particular occasion is trivial in the extreme. But when it is said everywhere that the Prince is more and more wearying of his social duties as a Royal pageant, and devoting himself more and more to those pleasures and amusements in which he finds more common-place reality and less form, it is worth while pointing out that there may be a real duty to discharge, and the praise of honest fortitude to win, in being a pageant,-such a pageant at least as is requisite to keep up respect for social forms, and to give all possible play to the power of men of genius or taste or wisdom. Men have won a battle by simply standing still to be shot at, and the steadiness of a leader at his place has often secured a triumph to more brilliant subordinates. It would certainly be a far higher praise for the Prince of Wales that, without caring for English society or fully understanding even its use, he had discharged his wearisome duties as its head faithfully, and so secured their full influence to men and women of less high rank who care more for it, and understand the secrets of its subtle organization better than himself, than to have felt even the most Carlylish contempt for its empty formalities, and therefore neglected its duties. If he cherish disgust for society, the chances are that, having no strong intellectual tastes of his own, he will devote to very common-place pleasures and self-indulgences the effort he spares himself as a prince. His father felt

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