5)
Wilson, who was clearly a great favorite of her creator, though to the
immense majority of men she would seem as disagreeably strong-minded
as most of Cooper's female characters are disagreeably weak-minded.
This lady is the widow of a general officer, who, the reader comes
heartily to feel, has, most fortunately for himself, fallen in the
Peninsular war. From her supreme height of morality she sweeps the
whole horizon of human frailties and faults, and looks down with a
relentless eye upon the misguided creatures who are struggling with
temptations to which she is superior, or are under the sway of beliefs
whose folly or falsity she has long since penetrated. In her, indeed,
there is no weak compromise with human feelings. The lesson meant to
be taught by the novel is the necessity of taking precaution in regard
to marriage. One point insisted upon again and again is the requirement
of piety in the husband. It is the duty of a Christian mother to guard
against a connection with any one but a Christian for her daughters:
for throughout the whole work the sovereign right of the parent over
the child is not merely implied, it is directly asserted. "No really
pious woman," says Mrs. Wilson, "can be happy unless her husband is in
what she deems the road to future happiness herself." When she is met
by the remark that the carrying out of this idea would give a deadly
blow to matrimony, she rises to the occasion by replying that "no man
who dispassionately examines the subject will be other than a Christian,
and rather than remain bachelors they would take even that trouble."
Nor in this was the author apparently expressing an opinion which he
did not himself hold in theory, however little he might have regarded
it in practice. He takes up the same subject in another place, (p. 026)
when speaking in his own person. "Would our daughters," he says,
"admire a handsome deist, if properly impressed with the horror of his
doctrines, sooner than they would now admire a handsome Mohammedan?"
On the matter of Sunday observance the narrowest tenets of Puritanism
were preached, and the usual ignorance was manifested that there were
two sides to the question. Some of the incidents connected with this
subject are curious. One of the better characters in the novel asks
his wife to ride out on that day, and she reluctantly consents. This
brings at once upon the stage the inevitable Mrs. Wilson, who always
stands ready to point a moral